Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology

NARRATIVE BODIES TOWARD A CORPOREAL NARRATOLOGY Daniel Punday Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology This...

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NARRATIVE BODIES TOWARD A CORPOREAL NARRATOLOGY

Daniel Punday

Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology

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Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology

By

Daniel Punday

NARRATIVE BODIES

© Daniel Punday, 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6241–3 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Punday, Daniel. Narrative bodies : toward a corporeal narratology / by Daniel Punday. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6241–3 1. Narration (Rhetoric). 2. Body, Human, in literature. I. Title. PN212.P88 2003 808⬘.001—dc21

2003041312

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

C on t e n t s

Preface

vii

Introduction

Narrative’s Lost Body

1

Chapter 1

Conceiving Modern Narrative

17

Chapter 2

Sorted and General Character Bodies

53

Chapter 3

Plot and the Unruly Body

85

Chapter 4

The Body and Kinetic Space

117

Chapter 5

Embodiment and Lightness in Narration

149

Conclusion Redefining Narrative

185

Notes Bibliography Index

191 213 225


Preface

A corporeal narratology approaches the writing and reading of stories in a way that may at first seem counterintuitive. To ask about the role of the body in narrative means suspending a long tradition that imagines reading as a disembodied, intellectual, and frequently spiritual experience. Frederick Douglass speaks articulately for this tradition when he describes coming to literacy as what makes him aware of his brute physical existence as a slave and starts him on the “upward” path to intellectual and political freedom. Douglass describes his first encounter with the disembodied life of reading as making his own corporeality all that much harder to bear: “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.”1 Critics today continue to urge readers to embrace literature in general as a means of moving beyond our individual bodies into a wider social understanding. As Harold Bloom has recently urged, “Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”2 If insisting on the body’s presence within the story seems to sin against narrative’s spirituality, suggesting that we can speak about the body in the story likewise seems to sin against the particularity that we attribute to our own physical existence. Indeed, if asked about the body in the story many of us might think first of the uncomfortable body that intrudes on our reading—the stiff neck that comes from reading too long in bed, the squinting eyes from trying to read a bestseller on the beach, the momentary disorientation we feel when we close a book and reenter the everyday world. In such cases, the body seems to be distinctly individual; it is what designers of reading chairs and book lights seem never quite to get right. Likewise, while we may recognize that there are bodies in stories— and anyone who has seen the stage at the end of Hamlet littered with bodies can hardly think otherwise—these bodies seem to be precisely what intrude at the end of the narrative, what is left after the plot has run its course.

viii / preface

There is, of course, something quite appealing in the narrative’s promise to lift us out of our individual bodies, just as there is something comforting in the idea that our bodies stubbornly resist plotting and give us a reference point for our individuality. What I argue in this book is that these appeals and comforts are neither natural nor inevitable. They are, instead, the result of a tradition that has worked to shape the body’s relevance to narrative in very particular and sometimes contradictory ways. In a recent defense of the value of traditional reading in the face of technological change, Sven Birkerts describes the “shadow life of reading” as a matter of escaping our everyday existence in a way that nonetheless makes us aware of this escape: “When we read, we create and then occupy a hitherto nonexistent interior locale. Regardless of what happens on the page, the simple fact that we have cleared room for these peculiar figments we now preside over gives us a feeling of freedom and control. No less exalting is the sensation of inner and outer worlds coinciding, going on, simultaneously, or very nearly so.”3 This commonplace image of reading a story as being caught up within a wholly private experience depends in part on our having left the body behind. Not only do we escape from the body while reading, but the experience of that escape, the suspension of corporeality, is part of what makes reading pleasurable. Birkerts describes only one of many ways that we can imagine the body in reading, but the way that he describes the relationship between story, reader, and interpretation is typical for depending on the body even while it argues that stories help us to escape it. In describing the “shadow life of reading” Birkerts is quite intentionally blurring the line between individual bodies and some general experience of corporeality that reading engenders. This elision is part of any attempt to articulate a phenomenology of reading, of course, but it is also the fundamental paradox of a corporeal narratology. What makes the body so important to narrative and to our ways of thinking about reading is how it seems to resist powerfully textual representation. When we examine our ways of telling and talking about stories, however, we discover very specific and regular patterns in the ways that the body manifests itself in narratives. In other words, far from being an irrepressibly individual “other” to narrative representation, the body is constantly given meaning and used as a part of textual representation. And, as Birkerts makes clear, often the value of the body to our ways of telling stories and talking about reading is precisely its “otherness”—its ability to stand in for what ought to be outside of representation. Both our ways of telling stories and the narratologies that we have constructed

preface / ix

for analyzing those stories deploy the body in very specific ways as part of a strategy of textual representation. Since the body is a part of our narratives and our narratologies, we have two different paths of inquiry that cross and double back throughout this study. First, we can ask how the body is used as a component of stories, and can do so using traditional narrative elements like plot, character, and setting. A corporeal narratology pursued in this direction enriches these traditional terms for speaking about narrative, and provides practical analytic tools for categorizing stories and analyzing their effects. A corporeal narratology in this sense helps us to see the body at work in elements of the story where we may not have recognized it otherwise. Likewise, since different cultures and periods think about the body in different ways, we can see how these different conceptions of the body lead writers to construct plot or setting, for example, differently. Second, a corporeal narratology can ask how the body contributes to our ways of speaking about and analyzing narrative. Birkerts’s description of reading in terms of the suspension of the body makes clear that the body is useful not just for telling stories, but for talking about why stories matter and for describing the experience of reading. A corporeal narratology in this sense moves naturally from an analysis of narrative terms to a theory of narrative hermeneutics—how stories become meaningful to readers. Most interesting, it seems to me, is the point where the historical comparisons occasioned by the different ways of imagining the body in different cultures and periods prompts us to think about the historical condition of our own narrative hermeneutics. In other words, although we tend to think that reading a story is a matter of stepping outside of our historical and social moment, it may well be that this way of thinking about reading itself is historically conditioned by, among other things, a conception of the human body. And if our terms for studying narrative have been developed by critics from the perspective of a particular historical moment—let us say, twentieth-century European and American culture—our most basic narratological terms and assumptions may bear the imprint of a particular way of thinking about corporeality. I will, in fact, argue that modern storytelling, defined by the “rise of the novel” in the eighteenth century, depends in part upon the emergence of scientific culture and resulting changes in our thinking about the body. Narratology in turn has reflected this particular conception of human corporeality. We can say that modern narrative, the modern body, and narratology itself are all deeply entwined, and emerge out of series of mutually supporting assumptions about human identity, textuality, and

x / preface

corporeality. As new paradigms emerge for thinking about human embodiment, so too we will see changes both in what it means to read a story, and in where writers put those bodies in their stories. A corporeal narratology, then, can not only correct theories of character or plot, and describe a richer sense of narrative hermeneutics, but can also help to anticipate the way that the writing and study of narrative will change as we begin to think about bodies, for example, as the result of a genetic blueprint or as infinitely reproducible through cloning. I have many people to thank for helping me to think through and develop this study. The shape of this project developed during my summer at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory (1998). In particular, Cathy Gallagher’s session on narratives of “undoing” forced me to think about the historical context of narrative concepts in a way that is absolutely central to this study. In many ways, this book can be seen as an attempt to start a dialogue between narratology and new historicism. Back at Purdue Calumet, I have the School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences to thank for a series of partial releases from teaching that provided me with the time to write individual chapters. Among the faculty there, Judith Burdan was a constant source of information and suggestions about the history of the novel, especially in the eighteenth century, which is far afield from my period of training. Kit Hume provided advice throughout the project and a thorough reading of the first draft. Brian Richardson read an earlier version of chapter 2 as an essay for Style, and the advice and encouragement that he gave me had an impact on the rest of the book. Philip Jenkins provided suggestions and sources that helped to give shape to chapter 1. Many of these chapters were first presented in some form at the annual Narrative conference, and benefited from the response and advice that I received there. I would like to thank the reader for Palgrave, whose suggestions were helpful especially in conceiving the book’s preface. Part of chapter 2 appeared first in Style under the title “A Corporeal Narratology?” (Style 34.2 [Summer 2000]: 227–42). The figure that appears in chapter 2 is reprinted from Fredric Jameson: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Copyright © 1981 by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. My thanks, finally, to Carol and Sam for their patience and support during the writing and revising of this book. They know as well as anyone that books are born not out of the disembodied mind, but from the often messy labor of the body.

INTRODUCTION Narrative’s Lost Body

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the human body to recent literary and cultural theory. Even the briefest survey of recent research reveals the body to be a fundamental element of theories that explain representation within texts and culture. A work like Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) is typical of the signal importance of the human body in recent theory. Their earlier and well-known Metaphors We Live By (1980) defined a series of important and general metaphors operating within philosophical and everyday thought.1 In this more recent study, Lakoff and Johnson now focus specifically on the human body as a crucial element within such metaphors. The body emerges here as the source of most of these metaphors: Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding.2

We can find no better example of the importance of the body as a figure within current thinking about representation than the way it functions in this passage to explain Lakoff and Johnson’s previous theory of metaphor. It should be obvious why Lakoff and Johnson—like so many other theorists writing today—have found the body so compelling a subject. After a decade of suspicion about language’s ability to refer to anything beyond itself, the body has emerged as a site where the power and problems of reference play themselves out. Although some critics have taken this theoretical interest in the body as an occasion to return to older

2 / narrative bodies

claims about the power of representation, most writing uses the body as a way to balance suspicion toward representation with a recognition that such representation plays a profound and productive role within culture. Typical in this regard is Alan Hyde’s critical legal theory in Bodies of Law (1997). Hyde seeks out contradictory treatments of the human body in law not only to reveal problems in legal theory, but also to speculate on the inescapable presence of the human body as a fundamental element of such theory: “We surely have knowledge of others’ bodies only through the mediation of discourse. The very ease with which we construct the body as machine, as property, as consumer commodity, as bearer of privacy rights or of narratives, as inviolable, as sacred, as object of desire, as threat to society, demonstrates that there is no knowledge of the body apart from our discursive constructions of it.”3 Ultimately, Hyde’s theory operates as a call to construct the body in responsible ways. Having recognized that “[t]he body is the way we represent to ourselves that there are other people, with lives, in the world” (258), Hyde uses the contradictions that he finds in the legal body to urge readers to consider alternate constructions of the body: “Most importantly, every aspect of the legal body on the above list [of legal formulations] might be changed. Often competing discursive constructions of the body have a contemporary subterranean existence, or were once popular but have passed from the scene, or have a vivid life in literature that has not yet influenced law” (261). Hyde’s wary recognition of the incoherence and inescapability of the human body within representation—its problems and its power—captures the spirit with which the body has emerged within theories of representation across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Despite the excitement that the body has generated in literary and cultural criticism, it has had almost no impact on narratology. This is surprising, since in many ways narratology is the area of literary criticism most traditionally concerned with extraliterary forms of cultural and folk representation. Narratology has particularly been receptive to media like graphic novels, television, and film. As a fundamental element of culture, we can expect that the representational dynamics of the human body would have a profound impact on storytelling in all forms. And yet, we have no “corporeal” narratology—no serious or sustained attempt to give the human body a central role within narrative. Certainly critics have been interested in the body’s place within individual narratives. Most collections of narratological criticism will make some use of the body as a social element to be thematized and debated. And yet a quick glance through any of the classic introductions

narrative’s lost body / 3

to narratology (Bal, Chatman, Martin) or through the best-known attempts at overall synthesis (Scholes and Kellogg, Stanzel, Coste) reveals an almost complete lack of interest in the body as a narratological category.4 The body appears in such studies usually as one of many “things” that a narrative might describe—in the same category as chairs, desks, and rocks. A telling instance of this dismissal of the human body’s importance in narrative is Seymour Chatman’s offhand comment in Story and Discourse, “[a]n existent . . . is either a character or an element of setting, a distinction based on whether or not it performs a plot-significant action” (32). Chatman’s assumption that everything material (inactive) about a character merely serves to define a setting for events seriously undervalues the role of the body in providing significance for characters, and defining the position of the narrator within the story. While there are many reasons why narratology has not become caught up in the theoretical excitement about the body, the most important arise from the way in which narratology has framed its subject. Probably the broadest reason for narratology’s disengagement with the human body is its fondness for what Gerald Prince has called questions of “how” over questions of “what.” An overview like Mieke Bal’s influential Narratology breaks narratology down into the study of “aspects” and “elements.” The former represent those components of a text manipulated in the telling of the story, like the order in which the events are related and the way that narration is focused on certain characters. The “elements” of the narrative refer to the actual events, actors, and places that make up the story. Clearly, a narrative cannot exist if it lacks both aspects and elements—both the careful rhetorical manipulation of actors and events, and those actors and events themselves. Yet, as Prince notes, narratology has traditionally been interested in the former: in the most common type of narrative criticism “the narratologist pays little or no attention to the story as such, the narrated, the what that is represented, and concentrates instead on the discourse, the narrating, the way in which the ‘what’ is represented.”5 There are many reasons for this focus on the manipulation of story elements rather than on the elements themselves. One reason is historical. Narratology as an academic discipline, especially in America, can be traced back to Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), which set the tone for narrative criticism for the next twenty years by demanding that critics consider the rhetorical effectiveness of any narrative style, rather than holding writers to abstract and arbitrary standards. Although narratology went in many different directions after Booth’s book, it oriented American criticism toward a kind of rhetorical analysis of individual texts in a way that


continues to produce interesting readings.6 A more important reason for narratology’s focus on the rhetorical manipulation of aspects rather than on story elements is that how one is to study such elements is by no means clear. While students at the undergraduate level can usually grasp with relatively little difficulty the idea that a narrative is a series of choices made by an author to achieve a certain effect and meaning, we have considerably more difficulty in explaining what an inquiry into the construction of “event” or “action” entails.7 Vicissitudes of Feminist Narratology We can see what forces are working directly and indirectly against integrating an interest in the human body into narratology by considering calls for a “feminist narratology.” Susan Lanser has offered a widely influential challenge to narratology to take gender as an important element of narrative in her article, “Toward a Feminist Narratology” (1986). Lanser suggests three specific areas in which feminism can force narratology to rethink some basic assumptions: “the role of gender in the construction of narrative theory, the status of narrative as mimesis or semiosis, and the importance of context for determining the meaning in narrative.”8 Although narratology has hardly undergone a fundamental transformation because of Lanser’s article, most critics recognize the validity of her claims. We can easily point to a series of feminist narratologies that have challenged the past focus on abstract questions of typology or temporality. Nonetheless, with a very few exceptions, these feminist narratologists have remained interested in questions of “how” rather than “what.” Indeed, Lanser sees the development of a feminist narratology as specifically a matter of turning away from a concern with plot and content issues toward narrative aspects of technique. In Fictions of Authority (1992), the book that develops her article-length call for a feminist narratology, Lanser specifically decries the lack of interest among feminists in the technical aspects of narrative: “With few exceptions, feminist criticism does not ordinarily consider the technical aspects of narration, and narrative poetics does not ordinarily consider the social properties and political implications of narrative voice.”9 The same kind of call for a turn to the “technical aspects of narration” can be seen in Robyn Warhol’s Gendered Interventions, which describes differences between male and female ways of using narrators and direct address in the Victorian novel: “realist novels—engaging narrators functioning as their authors’ surrogates in earnestly trying to foster sympathy for real-world sufferers—work to engage ‘you’ through the substance


and, failing that, the stance of their narrative interventions and addresses to ‘you.’ ”10 Clearly Warhol brings to her study of narrative an interest in gender that previous narratology lacked; nonetheless, she also remains focused on the traditional narratological issues of narrative “aspects,” how a given story is manipulated by an author for particular purposes. The result has been a productive but limited feminist narratology, a narratology that questions the way that writers tell stories but does not study the structure or limitations of the objects that they use in those stories. Feminist critics like Lanser and Warhol see themselves as attempting to break from a feminist tradition that focused on the “content” of narratives rather than on their textual presentation. Such older forms of feminist criticism might look at the ways in which women are described or the social order implied by narrative texts—all without a concern for how these issues are presented narratively. An interesting transitional work is Judith Fetterley’s influential study, The Resisting Reader (1978). Fetterley brings to the classic American literary texts that she studies a distinctly narratological framework focused on the experience of reading: Not only does powerlessness characterize woman’s experience of reading, it also describes the content of what is read. Each of the works chosen for this study presents a version and an enactment of the drama of men’s power over women. The final irony, and indignity, of the woman reader’s relation to American literature, then, is that she is required to dissociate herself from the very experience the literature engenders.11

This theoretical interest in the way that women can read these American literary texts leads Fetterley to a study not so much of how these narrative texts control perspective or voice—the sorts of things that Lanser and Warhol are interested in—but instead of the representation of women themselves within the text. Fetterley assumes that female readers will be alienated from or involved in the text to the degree that the representation of women in those texts matches their experience of being female. While there is no doubt a degree of truth to such a claim, more recent feminist work has insisted on asking about the specifically narrative choices made by authors. Thus, in Kathy Mezei’s Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers we find essays like the editor’s study of how “free indirect discourse” reflects the problems of female authority in Austen’s Emma.12 Such studies embody some of the same political concerns of earlier feminist work, but do so by examining the ways in which specific narrative choices reflect, sharpen, or defuse those concerns.


Strangely enough, as feminist narratology has become increasingly more sophisticated, it has also migrated away from concern with the body itself. One of the complaints frequently leveled at even rather upto-date feminist writing like that represented by Mezei’s collection is that it links narrative devices to the gendered bodies of the writers in an essentialist way. Warhol notes that Mezei’s collection assumes that “writing about gender necessarily has something to do with women’s writing.”13 More sophisticated feminist narratologies reject this link between gender and the actual bodies of the writers or characters. Warhol herself is careful to distinguish between the actual gender of the writers that she discusses and their decision whether to adopt masculine or feminine styles of narration: “My question for the novels I study is: What happens to a text when the writer is writing as a woman? Although the question is not at all a strictly biographical one (since male writers borrowed feminine-gendered techniques, and vice versa), I consult author’s personal circumstances and historical contexts, as well as textual signs of the kinds of interventions they use, in considering the ‘situation of enunciation’ that their texts reproduce.”14 It is hard to argue with Warhol when she distinguishes actual physical bodies from the feminist narratology that she articulates. And yet in making this distinction, Warhol takes us even further from a narratology organized around the representation of the human body and instead suggests that narratology should be interested in cultural categories and modes of discourse. The body, as very much a matter of the “what” of narrative rather than of its “how,” has had very little attention from such feminist narratologies. When feminist critics have turned to representations of the body, it is frequently at the expense of an interest in narrative itself. The special issue of Poetics Today on the female body edited by Susan Suleiman in 1985 is typical and revealing. In reviewing the recent history of narratology, Bal cites this issue as an instance of how recent criticism has drifted away from core narratological issues: “although this volume is definitely not devoid of narratological concerns, these certainly do not predominate.”15 And, indeed, Bal is right. This volume certainly talks a great deal about narrative and about the body, but the two rarely come together in a way that we could say that a narratology of the body has been produced. Suleiman’s own essay on alternatives to traditional ways of representing the female body is a case in point. Suleiman first discusses the reaction to recently popular female erotic texts, like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, and concludes, “If the popularity of these books is, on the one hand, a positive sign, suggesting that the American public is ready to


admit some real changes in what is considered an acceptable story or an acceptable use of language by women, it may also be a sign that neither book is felt to imply a genuine threat to existing ways of seeing and being between the sexes.”16 Suleiman then goes on to consider the alternatives to traditional representations of gender, concluding with Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, in which “it is impossible to say who is woman and who is man, where one sex or one self begins and the other ends” (63). While Suleiman certainly discusses the way that the representation of women’s bodies might be inappropriately treated using male models, she does not consider the conditions and effects of representing those male bodies. It is as if, for Suleiman, the representation of male bodies raises no issues interesting to narratology. Indeed, even when she is discussing the female body Suleiman implies that the problem is not that inherently this body is textually complex; rather, she is concerned more with how conventional representations of women’s bodies might be allowed to fall into traditional gender patterns and not “shake up and transform old habits of thought and old ways of seeing” (48). Despite her interest in how narrative represents gender, Suleiman does not ask the question that seems to me the central one of a corporeal narratology: how do certain ways of thinking about the body shape the plot, characterization, setting, and other aspects of narrative?17 Suleiman’s sidestepping of narrative issues in her discussion of the female body is in many ways typical of past criticism. Too often the body is taken to be a simple object of narrative, a thing to be represented like a town or a table, with little thought given to how it participates in the construction of narrative plot, location, agency, and so on. Suleiman clearly recognizes that the body has some role in these narrative issues, since she links the traditional image of the female body with traditional plot models like the Bildungsroman of the artist hero, “where the moment of self-discovery coincides with the decision to write a novel” (48). Suleiman is certainly right to suggest that body models support certain plot forms, but this and other details about the construction of the narrative body are left unexplored. Very often attention to the body as an object of representation within narrative seems to return to an older form of feminist criticism that fails to make use of the sophisticated narrative categories used by more recent critics like Lanser, Warhol, and Mezei. We seem, then, to have a sophisticated narrative criticism to the extent that the body is treated as mere raw material for rhetorical (and political) manipulation. Or we have a criticism sensitive to the description of the human body to the extent that we ignore how this portrait is being filtered through specifically narrative channels.


Problems of a Corporeal Narratology I have used shifts and debates in feminist narratology to suggest the problems facing a critic who would hope to develop a narrative theory organized around the human body. Certainly, there are other ways in which we might have told the same story and revealed the same dynamics. Criticism that focuses on the narrative presentation of the racially marked body reveals a similar pattern, where we see a tension between those critics who would study the types of bodies presented within the text and those that would study the rhetorical manipulation of the narrative.18 In neither feminist nor race criticism do we see a consistent articulation of the relationship between the bodies represented within a narrative and the way that the narrative itself is constructed. There are, however, exceptions to the rule that bodies and narrative structures are two separate objects of inquiry, never to meet within a single theory or study. Let me mention, briefly, two examples from relatively distinct periods. Deidre Lynch’s recent study of literary character in the eighteenth century, The Economy of Character (1998), argues that our modern ways of thinking about character developed only in the later nineteenth century.19 Earlier models of character depended heavily on their relationship to caricature, as well as to the “character” stamped upon a coin. Lynch’s study links the particular ways of thinking about human physiognomy prevalent at the time to the ways in which plots and perspective were constructed throughout the literature of this period. While not precisely narratological—Lynch rarely uses language of “implied authors” or “free indirect discourse”—this study clearly links traditional narrative categories to specific details of the human body. Likewise, Mark Seltzer sees in the relationship between individual bodies and statistical averages a problem that shapes American narrative at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as mass production and manufacturing take a firm hold on the national imagination. This strain in how we are to understand human corporeality produces specific patterns in how naturalist writers create “typical” persons. Concerns about being merely typical influence the aesthetics of narrative consumption and the positioning of readers, in which the “still life” of people-as-commodities is contrasted to the agency of the reader: “Whether enacted in the stop and go of the anticipatory ritual of window-shopping or in the identification, in passing, with the still-life representations of the model or manikin, such a rhythm of suspended and recovered motion and agency, such a rhythm of reification and personification, makes up the reanimating ritual of consumption.”20


Here, just as Lynch managed, Seltzer brings together a specific interest in the body with a concern for how this body influences basic narrative categories like the positioning of the narratee. What is remarkable about both Lynch’s and Seltzer’s studies—and these are part of a much larger group of texts that manage to strike the same balance between body and narrative concerns—is that they are relentlessly historical. Quite in contrast to the kind of transhistorical and comparative studies that we associate with narratology, the work that has best linked narrative and the body is decidedly new historicist. This should come as no surprise, since we can trace much of the popularity of the body within contemporary thought to Foucault, whose work remains a touchstone for new historicist theory. In many ways we have here a gap between two theoretical schools, with two entirely separate ways of approaching the body within narrative. Narratology constructs abstract, generalized models of narrative, which—in part because of this insistence on abstraction—has had difficulty dealing with the concrete historical object of the human body. New historicism, conversely, develops a nuanced understanding of the human body as a site in which particular conflicts can be observed within discourses of the time, but has made no attempt to generalize its analysis of the body in these narratives beyond the particular historical moment that it studies. This should not surprise us, since such particularity is a fundamental assumption of this historicist criticism. In asking about the place of the human body within narratology, I am in many ways applying a new historicist topos to a discipline in which it does not initially seem to apply. Likewise, in trying to develop a narratology of the human body, I may seem to be trying to generalize an object of study that is interesting precisely because of its historical specificity. A narratology of the body, in other words, threatens to be no narratology at all, and to evacuate from the human body all the interest and power that it has for new historicist work. I will show in this book that this need not, however, be the case, and that the tension between these two disciplines can help to produce a rich understanding of the concept of narrative. Unlike many of the terms that critics use in studying texts and cultural objects, the basic terms of narratology have a role within everyday discourse that cannot be restricted to one historical moment. Foucault’s work seems to me to depend on just such transhistorical concepts. After all, his writing is always comparative and likewise works between periods. His analysis of the transition from torture to incarceration works precisely by examining the changing


relationship between power and knowledge in these two periods.21 These periods are not self-contained and built out of concepts entirely their own, but instead the product of the translation of broader philosophical concepts like power from one period and episteme to the next.22 Narratologists perhaps depart from this comparative approach to texts by searching for a general slate of textual options available at all times, while new historicism considers discursive limits unique to particular sociopolitical configurations. Still, the give and take between general categories and particular historical manifestations seems to be a point at which these seemingly contradictory methodologies can be brought together. New historicism depends on, then, concepts that transcend one particular historical moment, even if they are not universal and timeless. The link between power and knowledge in Discipline and Punish is, we can say, moderately historical. It transcends some historical periods and gives us a way of speaking about how different periods can manifest a similar series of philosophical or social possibilities in different ways. Narrative concepts seem particularly appropriate for transhistorical use because they describe the most traditional forms of artistic representation.23 Indeed, in many ways narratology reflects the belief of so many critics and general readers have that concepts as story and character are a fundamental part of everyday experience. Roland Barthes exemplifies the tendency to see narrative in all cultures and periods at the outset of his influential narratological essay, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966): “narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds.”24 The belief that narrative is transhistorical does not belong only to universalist critics who would claim that certain works or modes transcend their historical moment. Certainly much of the work that we associate with early poststructuralism insisted along with Hayden White that all discourse is a form of storytelling. While we might be tempted now to insist that the conditions of narrative vary a great deal from historical moment to historical moment and from culture to culture, there is a strong urge among many sophisticated critics to see narrative concepts as crossing these moments and providing a way of thinking about discourse in general. This, I think, is one of the paradoxes of corporeal narratology—that narrative categories have emerged precisely at the moment when our suspicion toward transhistorical analysis is


particularly strong. Narrative provides moderately historical concepts that enable historicist analysis. That is, narrative both reflects epistemic conditions of particular historical moments and yet at the same time strives to be more general and less limited by these conditions. Precisely because of its claim to be a natural and commonplace form of discourse, narrative has a larger historical sweep than many of the concepts that are frequently studied by historicists. Precisely this sort of cross-cultural but not timeless concept tends to fall between the cracks of new historicist work. I will argue in this book that narratology as we have understood it— as comprising a series of fairly concrete theoretical terms as well as a general approach to understanding narrative texts—depends on modern conceptions of the body. The vicissitudes of narrative that we can observe since the Renaissance can be traced, in part, back to smaller shifts of emphasis within a more general way of understanding the human body inaugurated at roughly this same time. Plan of the Book This book opens by defining the historical scope for the moderately historical concept of narrative by looking at the corporeal assumptions in the most fundamental element of any narrative text—the way that it refers to the extratextual world, how it imagines mimesis. Specifically, I start my consideration of how the human body shapes narrative concepts by describing the way that we speak of the “fictional world” of the narrative text. The concept of fictional worlds developed over the last twenty years in narratology as a response to structuralist emphasis on the anti-referential, self-contained quality of texts as sign-systems. Theorists claim that any text projects a world of places, objects, and events, in part, as a way to make sense of thorny metaphysical issues about how fictional texts refer. Recent work on fictional worlds has increasingly emphasized the operation of such projected fictional worlds in everyday thinking and reasoning. In chapter 1 I link the acceptance of such fictional possibilities to changes in thinking about human conception. As embryology struggles during the early eighteenth century to escape from the traditional belief in a single source for fetal identity— either the female egg or male sperm—narrative struggled toward a definition of hypothetical identity that likewise was organized around a combination of real and imagined events. Such “accidental” combinations did not emerge consistently in embryology until the middle of the century, when at the same time the European novel begins to lay claim


to fictional narrative as morally and philosophically valid. Treating narrative as creating a fictional world depends, then, on a particular image of human biological identity that is historically specific and limited in the kinds of biological changes that it can posit within fiction. I conclude chapter 1 by suggesting that this time period marks the emergence of narrative as a historical category, and arguing that the concept can be applied before this period only in limited and problematic ways. Having argued that a particular way of understanding the human body can influence even so pervasive and abstract a narrative concept as that of fictional worlds, chapter 2 offers an analysis of the narrative use of the human body in characterization. When we imagine a theory of narrative bodies, characterization is likely to be the first narrative term to come to mind. I begin by considering what is necessary for the body to emerge as a meaningful object within a story, suggesting four basic types of relations that need to be defined directly or indirectly by a narrative: bodies must be distinguished from other objects within the text, must be sorted into types, must be defined in relation to the world outside of themselves, and must be granted a degree of embodiment. Such a schematic provides a way of distinguishing different forms of characterization and outlines many of the concerns that will appear throughout the remainder of the book. At the same time, however, this discussion is constantly haunted by the problems of treating the body merely as a textual object. Turning to some recent feminist work on corporeality, I supplement this theory of character bodies as objects with a broader and more elusive sense in which the human body provides a metaphor for thinking about the relation between text and reader. Such metaphors reveal a more basic truth in our relationship with character bodies: that our encounter with texts is always mediated by the corporeality of bodies, which provides an inevitable model for textual hermeneutics in general. Chapter 3 turns to the concept of narrative plot, in many ways the most fundamental concept within narratology. I begin by noting within narratology that the temporal arrangement of narrative is always assumed to operate on events and objects that are otherwise meaningless, brute facts. This is especially important for an understanding of narrative bodies because such meaningless facts are frequently equated with the body. Paradoxically, the exact opposite is also the case: the narrative structures that give order to narrative—both the overarching cosmological patterns that we can observe in archetypal criticism like that of Northrop Frye, as well as the patterns of inevitable social trajectory that so many feminist critics have discussed in the novel—are also


associated with the body. In a quite literal way that critics have been aware of for some time, in the novel the body frequently defines the destiny of the character. In a broader sense, we can say that the body seems to provide two contradictory things to our thinking about narrative events. On the one hand, the body represents all of those brute physical events that work against overarching pattern; on the other, the body provides the order that the narrative gives to events. This duality of the human body reappears throughout our thinking about narrative and desire, where the most conventional plots are created precisely through the attraction to something that initially troubles social patterns or narrative trajectory but which is eventually integrated when—as is most common—the initially troubling love interest of the narrative turns out to be a perfectly acceptable social match for the hero or heroine. The duality of the body that we see in narrative plot plays itself out not only in conventional marriage plots, but also in ways of thinking about the difference between interior consciousness and external actions. Turning to Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, I discuss the “distention” of time as the basis for narrative, and locate this distention within the gap between body and mind. I argue that we can read the transformation of conventional narrative patterns into modernist studies of consciousness as a shift in the role given to the unruly body within thinking about narrative events. This transformation of the unruly body from raw material or vehicle of desire into the outside world to which the mind responds occurs whenever modern and contemporary thinkers describe the relationship between individual and world. The example that I use to conclude chapter 3 is the way in which social practice is imagined by cultural critics. Picking up from Foucault’s theory of social practice as potentially independent of an existing cultural episteme, I note the way in which the concept of practice repeats the use of the unruly body as a object that resists larger narrative patterns. The body here remains a fundamental trope in our ways of thinking about order and narrative’s ability to represent challenges to it. Chapter 4 turns to theories of narrative space and setting. Picking up from an observation made by Elaine Scarry, I note that settings are always organized by reference to the other places into which character bodies can travel—physically, imaginatively, and perceptually. Such distinctions provide a sophisticated and very flexible way of thinking about narrative setting. Using this idea that setting conceived of corporeally always gestures beyond itself, I develop what I call a “kinetic” theory of narrative based as much on the instability of space as the


constant movement of time. Just as the body in narrative temporality challenges pattern and creates “distention” within the story, so too the body is what makes setting unstable and forces constant movement. Such an observation raises the possibility that we might do better to treat narrative more as a matter of spatial movement than as a matter of temporal change. Making such a shift in our way of thinking about narrative may well lead to a significant improvement in our ability to speak about the aesthetics of narrative—which the theory of “virtual space” borrowed from Susanne Langer helps to articulate. My theory of kinetic space leads naturally to issues of our own positioning in the text—to the ways that we occupy a place within the whole narrative circulation—and returns us to the issues of chapter 2. There I note that at its extreme a corporeal narratology ultimately becomes an issue of textual hermeneutics. Certainly this is the case with an understanding of narrative aesthetics based on the process of following through the circulation of the narrative. I conclude chapter 4 by considering the issue of circulation itself in detail. Catherine Gallagher has written about the role of circulation in eighteenth-century thinking about public health and the body politic, and has noted the ways in which this metaphor raises fundamental problems about where an observer “stands” in relation to such an object of study. Ultimately, then, such a study encounters fundamentally narrative problems—how is an object to be viewed, narrated, and described? In chapter 5 I take up this positioning in more detail as I turn to the narratological treatment of narration. Focusing on writing about the body politic— especially Hobbes’s description of the “artificial man” of the social state in Leviathan—I note that this figure for representing the whole society itself obeys largely narrative demands. Hobbes makes clear that we should think about the society as an artificial man because doing so provides us with a position from which to view the whole. We can say, then, that a corporeal narratology leads us back naturally to the problems of positioning and reading, and that the principle way of understanding these problems is through the human body. Chapter 5 treats the problem of narrative positioning specifically within the larger context of the struggle to create narrative authority. Although narratology frequently takes a rhetorical approach to the question of authority, histories of the early novel suggest that authority is established first and foremost by manipulating embodiment within the narrative. Specifically, critics of the eighteenth-century novel have noted the use of what I call the differential embodiment of characters—the creation of central, relatively disembodied heroes or heroines, and more


embodied peripheral characters for whom physiognomy is a far more important element of characterization. This differential embodiment encourages us to identify with the main character at the expense of the peripheral ones, and provides a base for reading transformations of this model in the later history of the novel. In particular, I discuss how embodiment is handled to create narrative authority and a position through which to view the narrative first in sentimental fiction, and later in modernist narrative. In all these cases, authority is a matter of negotiating the embodiment of characters. That central issue of embodiment reflects the fundamentally corporeal nature of narrative. Narrative is corporeal not simply because it needs to use character bodies as a natural part of the stories that it tells, but also because the very ways in which we think about narrative reflect the paradoxes of the body—its ability to give rise to and resist pattern, its position in the world and outside of it, and so on. Narrative, then, always first and foremost depends upon a corporeal hermeneutics—a theory of how the text can be meaningfully articulated through the body—even if narratology has frequently treated it, or seemed to treat it, as something quite different.


CHAPTER 1 Conceiving Modern Narrative

In the last decades of the seventeenth and the first decades of the eighteenth centuries, European thought saw the emergence of the idea of a “world” in many fields. In Germany, G.W. Leibniz theorized the concept of “possible worlds”—the idea that our reality can be viewed as one of a nearly infinite number of possible other states of being through which God sorted in the process of deciding how the human world should unfold (1686). In Italy, Giambattista Vico proposed studying the history of human societies in contextualist terms—emphasizing, in other words, attention to the particular “world” in which people within a particular society at a particular time operated (1725).1 In France, Madame de Lafayette wrote La Princesse de Clèves (1678), often considered the first modern European novel because of its treatment of character psychology, thus ushering in an artistic period, which continues today, of constructing texts for mass consumption that transport readers into a “world” described through a character’s distinct, personal perspective.2 At about the same time as these changes, scientists began to develop modern theories of human reproduction by postulating the existence of the female egg and shortly after using the newly developed microscope to study the composition of sperm. Although it would be some time before the biology of reproduction was fully understood, the basic components of human generation were discovered by the beginning of the eighteenth century. At first blush, of course, this last scientific development seems at best tangentially related to the first three, all of which describe what we can call modern contextualist thinking. All four partake of modern scientific assumptions about human and natural life. If, as Michael Crowe has argued in The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900, Leibniz’s writing about possible worlds should be read against the backdrop of the new astronomy and the development of the telescope, the same seems to be true of discoveries about human sexuality.3 Likewise, Vico’s observations about


historiography appear as part of a general attempt to redefine the study of history and societies as a “New Science” grounded in universal principles and in the search for knowable causes.4 Literary critics have likewise thoroughly established the relationship between the development of the novel and the scientific revolution, which fits hand-in-glove with the former’s emphasis on individual perception, secular life, and progressive humanism. I would like to suggest, however, a deeper and less frequently recognized link between the growing recognition of the distinct “worlds” in which individuals and societies live in Leibniz, Vico, and Lafayette and early modern changes in thinking about human reproduction. In other words, I will argue for a relationship between the science of human reproduction and the concept of distinct imaginative “worlds” at work within philosophy, the human sciences, and, especially, thinking about narrative. Explicating this link between embryology and ideas of possible worlds is important because it helps to explain the historical emergence of the concept of “fictional worlds” as a way to speak about narrative, and the historical limits of the concept of narrative itself. A narrative’s ability to construct a “world” is its most basic textual act. The concept of world is a good place to begin a study of corporeality in narratology precisely because such abstract concepts seem to have almost nothing to do with the human body. Indeed, the concept of world is in this sense the exemplary narrative concept, since it reflects narratology’s abstraction and emphasis on traditional logic. In locating the body as a component of fictional world, we imply its relevance to narratology in general, and suggest the problems and limitations of narratology as it is currently imagined. The issue of fictionality has been a point at which narratology has in fact come under fire from historians of the novel. Narratologists suggest that we live in a world surrounded everyday by fictions. We plan career moves by imagining likely futures for ourselves, we listen to political advertisements about hypothetical creatures like “the American people,” and we judge our and others’ actions based more often on models provided by films, novels, and video games as on philosophical reasoning. According to these critics, fiction is a fundamental and unremarkable part of how we negotiate the everyday world. And yet at the same time, other critics—especially those working on the early European novel—have constructed rich and sophisticated cultural histories to show that many of the seemingly universal characteristics of fictional narrative are the product of very specific social and historical forces. Where in the past critics were wont to stress the timeless relevance of certain plots and fictional characters,

conceiving modern narrative / 19

recent histories of the novel have shown that the very idea of creating fictional characters through which readers explore morality and develop their sense of social and individual identity is no more than two hundred years old. As Catherine Gallagher writes, for too long we have emphasized the rise of the novel when studying modern narrative: “We should ask, not why the novel became the preferred form of fiction, but why fiction became a preferred form of narrative.”5 The very idea of creating unabashedly “untrue” stories—an idea criticized, defended, and worried over at least since Plato—achieved its current formulation and acceptance only because of philosophical, demographic, and economic changes in the eighteenth century, these critics suggest. Despite narratology’s tendency to take narrative’s creation of fictional worlds as a logical given, then, the historical specificity of such possible worlds is very much in question. This chapter articulates corporeality within the concept of narrative worlds. In doing so, it encapsulates the concerns of the project as a whole, since I will critique narratology’s insistence on generalizable textual patterns and abstract logical conditions. More specifically, this project will sketch out the scope and limitations of narratology, suggesting that the type of narrative that it concerns itself with is ultimately modern. As this project will argue overall, narratology is the study of modern narrative because narratology ultimately assumes a modern body at the base of all narrative acts. Narrative and Trans-World Identity Modern possible world theory, especially as applied to narrative texts, has evolved as a result of deep problems in reconciling our everyday thinking about hypothetical entities with traditional metaphysics. The idea that a fictional narrative projects a “world” develops in part as a way to resolve apparent contradictions in how we speak about fictional entities. After all, there is no such person as “Sherlock Holmes”—to take the overused example from fictional world philosophy. Thus references to this person within the novel, casual conversation, or literary criticism would seem consequently to be lies. And yet this is quite obviously not the case. As Michael Riffaterre notes, whereas “fictitious truth” is an oxymoron, most of us believe that “fictional truth” is not.6 It is truer to say that Sherlock Holmes lives in London than to say that he lives in New York. Early philosophies of fictional reference saw an irreconcilable problem in a sentence like “Sherlock Holmes lives in London” since no such person—other than someone who happens to own the same name


by accident but who has no relationship to the events depicted in the novels—exists in the real world. Bertrand Russell is usually associated with the strict “segregationist” argument that fictional entities simply do not exist and consequently that no truth claim can be made about fiction.7 In spite of this, of course, we all want to be able to have robust discussions not only about the interpretation of a narrative, but about its basic facts—something quite difficult if we accept the impossibility of making truthful claims about it. A number of ways to account for the truth of this apparent falsehood have consequently developed in the wake of Russell’s argument. One fruitful and commonsensical response to these metaphysical problems draws on possible-world theory. When applied to the question of fictional reference, possible-world theory simply states that a sentence referring to a fictional character such as “Sherlock Holmes lives in London” has an implicit contextualizing operator. We make truthful claims about nonactual states of being everyday when we say “I hope that it stops raining this afternoon.” The phrase “I hope that” brackets the untruthful statement “it stops raining” in a way that allows it nonetheless to be part of a truthful claim. Likewise, possible world theory suggests that when we make a claim about the facts of a fictional text, we are implicitly saying “In the world of Conan Doyle’s novel” before we say “Holmes lives in London.” Although some critics associate each text with an individual world, it is probably more accurate to say that each text refers to a range of possible worlds, since fictional entities are necessarily incomplete—that is, many elements of these entities are undetermined.8 Thus, although in the real world a character must have been born either on a particular day or not born on that day, a fictional text may well be silent on this character’s birthday and thus be compatible with both possible worlds.9 One traditional complaint about possible world theory is that it implies that writers do not create fictional characters so much as discover the possible worlds in which they exist. The distinction between the ontologically incomplete fictional text and the many possible worlds to which it may refer, however, seems to alleviate this problem somewhat, since it suggests that a fictional text is not so much a possible world in and of itself, but rather a means by which various possible worlds are recognized and brought into relationship with each other. The key to possible-world thinking is the idea that we can imagine another world that departs in specific ways from our real world. This is true of narrative fiction, but is especially clear when we construct alternative narratives in everyday thinking. When I say, “I could bake a cake


if I’d stopped at the grocery” I am making reference to an alternative world—one defined as the same as the actual world except for the fact that in this alternative world rather than coming directly home from campus I stopped at the store. The logic of possible world thinking depends on the idea that all conditions other than those intentionally revised remain the same. The majority of objects in this possible world have, in other words, trans-world identity—they are the same in both real and possible worlds. Thus, permanent entities like the store and the route home, as well as more transient conditions like the amount of traffic and weather for that day, remain the same when I speculate about stopping for groceries. Is the “I” of the actual world and the “I” of the alternative world the same? Certainly it is, unless I am imagining some sort of spiritual experience that occurred in the course of my shopping trip that utterly transforms my psychology, disposition, beliefs, and so on. Stopping or not stopping at the store except in this extraordinary instance is an inessential fact about my life, and consequently we will normally say that I am the same person regardless of whether I inhabit this actual or the alternative possible world. Possible world thinking depends on the belief in this identity—that we can change one condition in a way that illuminates all other conditions. Although the relation between fictional and real world is obviously more complex in the genre of narrative fiction—in a novel, for example—we nonetheless generally assume that the “facts” of the real world are left unaltered in this alternative world except insofar as the story itself directly touches on those facts. Thus, when King Richard appears in Ivanhoe, we assume that the general historical facts of his reign are left unchanged except where those changes become an explicit part of the story, and that we can bring any historical information that is common knowledge in Scott’s time to bear on the novel. We assume, in other words, a general trans-world identity between large parts of the real world and a novel. The problems of defining trans-world identity reveal a great deal about the assumptions in this kind of everyday hypothetical or fictional narrative. In his highly influential Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke addresses these problems by turning to the traditional difficulty of defining the meaning of a proper name. Naming is part of the problem of trans-world identity because in asking whether a thing in one “world” is the same thing in another we are asking to what extent a similarity of name can be equated with a similarity of identity. Linking name and identity is a long-running problem in theories of reference. When we refer to Aristotle, to take Kripke’s example, what do we mean by this name? One traditional answer is to say that the “meaning” of a name can


be defined by substituting a “definite description” for it—that is, a description that is true of one and only one person, place, or thing.10 So when we refer to Aristotle, we can implicitly substitute, for example, “the teacher of Alexander the Great” to give the name meaning. Kripke notes a number of problems with this theory, among which is the fact that eventually we may all turn out to be wrong about some seemingly essential fact in a person’s life. Thus, if Shakespeare can be glossed as “the writer of Hamlet” but it is later discovered that Marlowe actually wrote this play, it is wrong to suggest that Marlowe has become Shakespeare. In this context, Kripke distinguishes between necessary and contingent properties. A contingent property (such as “stopped at the store for milk on June 25”) can vary between possible worlds without raising questions about the identity of the person. Necessary properties cannot, however. Kripke gives the example of the number nine: “does it have the property of necessary oddness? Has that number got to be odd in all possible worlds? Certainly it’s true in all possible worlds, let’s say, it couldn’t have been otherwise, that nine is odd. Of course, 9 could also be equally well picked out as the number of planets. It is not necessary, not true in all possible worlds, that the number of planets is odd.”11 Although we might initially hope to use necessary properties to define trans-world identity, we quickly realize that individuals possess far too few necessary qualities to define them definitely.12 Kripke argues that the kind of description that we can use to define about whom we are speaking is not a permanent part of most names. If a friend points out his mother across the room to me by describing her as wearing the “blue wool sweater” and then I discover later that the sweater is in largely composed of a synthetic material, I will not then begin to wonder who his real mother is. This definition need only enable me to pick this woman out of a room. Kripke suggests that any description used to explain who we are talking about has some kind of incomplete, contingent quality. When we try to explain the meaning of “Einstein” we might well answer “the man who discovered relativity theory” (82). But many people may not know enough about this theory to distinguish it from other related scientific claims. Instead, Kripke suggests, what we mean by a name is what some other person means by the name. Shifting his example to Gödel, Kripke notes, “I may then say, ‘Look, by “Gödel” I shall mean the man Joe thinks proved the incompleteness of arithmetic.’ Joe may then pass the thing over to Harry” (90). Kripke goes on to describe a “chain” of such references that may or may not actually “get back to the man by referring to such a chain in that way, borrowing the references one by one” (90). Although this means of


“fixing a reference” of a name to a particular person may strike us as problematic, Kripke argues that precisely this is the means by which names are usually attached to people in everyday life: Someone, let’s say, a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. A speaker who is on the far end of this chain, who has heard about, say Richard Feynman, in the market place or elsewhere, may be referring to Richard Feynman even though he can’t remember from whom he first heard of Feynman or from whom he ever heard of Feynman. He knows that Feynman is a famous physicist. A certain passage of communication reaching ultimately to the man himself does reach the speaker. He then is referring to Feynman even though he can’t identify him uniquely. (91)

According to Kripke, all names are defined by this type of referential linking. As Kripke suggests, it is not the actual ability to reconstruct such a series of links, but rather the feeling within a whole community that one could do so if necessary that grounds the referentiality of names. The communal belief in such a chain gives meaning to the name because it allows us, hypothetically, to fix it to an actual person. Although much of the debate about fictional entities is likely to seem abstract and divorced from everyday storytelling, Kripke’s theory about the importance of birth to trans-world identity reveals assumptions at work unrecognized within all of our modern ways of thinking about narrative. One important implication of this theory of character identity is that thinking about narrative as creating “possible worlds” is necessarily anti-essentialist and emphasizes the open-endedness of human activity. It is easy to see how deeply anti-essentialism is ingrained in possible world thinking when this open-endedness is violated, as it is in Ursula LeGuin’s fantasy novel, The Lathe of Heaven. This novel in many ways seems concerned with possibility, but violates the basic rules of possibleworld thinking. LeGuin tells the story of George Orr, whose dreams cause the world to change; they do not merely predict the future, but fundamentally rearrange the world (including the past) to account for the dreamed event seamlessly as part of the natural order. When Orr finally manages to convince his psychiatrist William Haber of his power, Haber begins to use it to reshape the world to eliminate various sources of human suffering. These changes are always accomplished, however, through unexpectedly horrific means. Commanded to dream a less overpopulated world, Orr dreams a plague that kills 5 billion people;13 asked to imagine peace on earth, Orr imagines an alien invasion that unites


humans in desperate struggle against immanent attack (85). Orr confronts Haber with his genuine inability to improve the condition of the world: “Look, it’s not that I want to block you, to frustrate your plans. Ending the war was a good idea, I agree with it totally. . . . But I guess I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world. The best I can do is substitute one kind of war for another” (86). LeGuin develops a narrative, in other words, precisely by denying genuinely open-ended possible worlds. This is what gives her story its coherence and allows the many realities that Orr produces to have shape, since the same characters and the same conflicts reappear throughout the many worlds that he creates. Indeed, it is easy to see why LeGuin has to violate the principles of possible-world thinking in this novel. Lacking the anchoring point of the baptismal moment—which like everything else is subject to change in Orr’s dreams—LeGuin needs some other method to create coherence in her narrative. Without such a method, each of Orr’s realities would create the world anew, and no narrative of the progression of one to the next would be possible. The repeated patterns that seem inescapable accomplish this, but only at the cost of discarding the anti-essentialist futurity that is characteristic of possible-world thinking. Possible-world theory, then, assumes that human thought and action are unlimited. Orr’s distinctly limited futurity means that the alternative worlds that he dreams fail to coincide with the principle of possibleworld theory—that certain conditions of the present world can be varied intentionally and in a controlled way without changing any other conditions. In the context of a strongly deterministic understanding of human nature—where, for example, God is constantly at work directing the most minute human actions—such possible-world thinking would be largely absurd. When Leibniz formulates possible-world thinking in part to explain how God has chosen the best of all possible worlds for us to inhabit, he certainly is proposing a certain kind of personal “substance” that includes “everything that has happened to him and marks of everything that will happen to him.”14 But that essence can only be recognized through God’s omniscience, and Leibniz is quick to distinguish between logically “necessary” and mere divinely foreseen “certain” facts—facts that are certain “accidentally” (45). In this possibleworld account of divine foreknowledge, God is not an active force manipulating the world directly, but rather an abstract representation of the ideal “vision” or understanding of the universe (38) according to which its logic and principles are obvious. Leibniz aside, we can say that the belief that things might have been otherwise works against the


assurance that the deity has laid down some plan according to which events occurred.15 In possible-world thinking taken to its logical end, we must believe that humans are composed of few if any unchanging qualities and that we are free to imagine a wide range of variations from the real world. Because there is so little that is essential to our identity, human choice becomes paramount and the consideration of many possible worlds that flower out from the present moment becomes a useful way to consider the choices before us. Starting Points As this discussion of possible-world theory suggests, the tradeoff for the radical openendedness of possible-world theory is that a certain moment in the naming process becomes essential for determining the organization of all consequent possible worlds that will surround this individual. Possible-world theory and this fiction share something—an emphasis on character individuality and human potential in which narrative motivation is articulated through character choice and action. Even when character actions appear to be determined by outside forces, as in some varieties of naturalist narrative, those forces are usually treated as emerging at particular moments. A naturalist work like Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, for example, unfolds precisely by placing its central character in a situation where he is prompted “you must choose— choose! And then act. You must!”16 even though we are to recognize how much that choice is a product of social and economic factors. The necessity of such a starting point has not been given any sustained attention from narrative theorists. Such a starting point, however, is precisely the way that the concept of narrative worlds comes to depend on a particular image of human corporeality. This essential starting point is birth—or, more precisely, the baptism or other naming ceremony that follows the birth. We can see why this moment is necessary for Kripke’s theory, of course; without such a protected moment, we would have no way of being sure that the person that we call “Holmes,” for example, is really the detective that we know from other stories. It is precisely because she dispensed with fixed starting points and allowed Orr to rewrite the past that LeGuin’s novel could not imagine open-ended futures and thus defied possible-world thinking. The continuity of the name, the simple fact that the naming itself will not become part of the possible-world variation that will be explored in the narrative, becomes the precondition for being able to imagine other futures and pasts. Many of us have been led to wonder,


when confronted by the inexplicable acts of our parents, whether we might not have been adopted. Such possible-world thinking seems much more radical by apparently rejecting the basis upon which my discussion of Kripke has suggested possible-world narratives must be constructed. And yet, this radical contemplation of rebirthing is played out over and over again in classic realist narrative. A long-maligned hero or heroine suffers from cruel parents or lack of social standing only to discover in the resolution to the story that his or her birth has been shrouded and that secretly he or she really possesses precisely the parents and status he or she seems so lacking throughout the story. It is a story at the heart of fairy tales like “Cinderella” and novels like Evelina, and common enough by the middle of the nineteenth century to become the subject of parody in narratives like Great Expectations. While these narratives of discovered birth seem to suggest that the baptismal moment described by Kripke as the basis of possible-world thinking is not sacrosanct, a more complex drama is being played out in these stories. It is essential to narratives like Evelina and even Great Expectations that the issue of the child’s birth is resolved in the end to provide a teleology for the whole narrative, no matter how potentially confusing to possible-world thinking it might seem along the way. Great Expectations begins, of course, with the question of naming and baptism in the graveyard, where Pip muses on his family name and studies the tombstone inscriptions for clues about his parents. Pip’s attempt to define his identity at this outset of this narrative must be traced back to a moment of naming that is curiously without external, parental authority, “So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”17 Pip’s attempt to understand his identity in the light of this very tenuous baptismal moment is connected throughout the novel to the “expectations” that he develops and the mysterious benefactor that he seems to have. This benefactor and the social status that is promised to Pip seems to repeat a traditional story of hidden birth; the revelation of this benefactor’s identity at the end of the novel would seem to complete the naming that is noted but left unclear at the outset of the novel. Of course, exactly the opposite happens, and we see in retrospect that this moment of naming at the outset of the novel is not the sign of some hidden identity later to be divulged, but the actual moment at which Pip is given his name and narrative trajectory by his encounter with Magwich. Regardless of the ending of the story—the conventional one of social (re)discovery or the ironic one of Pip’s false expectations—the narrative functions in essentially the same way. The novel seems to question the identity of the characters, their foundational moment in the baptism of parental naming,


only to reveal in the end the name and circumstances of baptizing that grant an identity and confirm the whole narrative. The baptismal moment is not lessened in these narratives, but rather confirmed in its significance. What we see in narratives that suspend the moment of naming the character only ultimately to resolve that name in a way that gives meaning and shape to the whole story is a rudimentary element of the artistic shaping of narrative. It is the difference between the fundamentally troubling question, “what if I’m really not who I think I am?” and the ultimately reassuring story, “How I Discovered my True Identity.” The former seems to mark a point without a baptismal moment, a narrative that is “meaningless” because the possibilities are organized around a character who may or may not be the same person in each of the various story worlds. The latter takes this confusion and makes an aesthetically satisfying narrative out of it, using and controlling the naming confusion for the sake of suspense. The narrative ordering achieved through an understanding of birth and baptism is what links realist fiction and possible-world theory.18 A good example of the absolute importance of birth as a reference point for possible-world thinking—the inability for a narrative to posit such worlds without a starting point—is the popular 1983 movie Back to the Future. In this film, young Marty (Michael J. Fox) unwittingly travels into the past and finds himself inadvertently disrupting the romance between his future mother (Lea Thompson) and father (Crispin Glover). As the two drift further and further apart, the likelihood of their marriage and consequently of Marty’s eventual birth grows dimmer. Glancing at a picture of his family, Marty sees himself and his siblings gradually fading from the picture as he races to undo this damage and sidestep this version of the grandfather paradox. Steven Spielberg’s decision to treat this impending paradox by gradually erasing Marty is narratively inevitable, perhaps, although philosophically problematic. Had Marty somehow been the instrument of his parents’ death, for example, this erasure would make sense; this is, after all, the classic concern of the grandfather paradox. In Back to the Future, however, Marty merely works to separate his parents. Both, we might assume, will likely go on to marry someone else and, equally likely, produce children. The film suggests a fundamental narrative gap between those children and Marty; there is no sense in which his identity could be traced back to these other children of his parents, no way in which his place within the narrative can be rescued from obliteration. At first, this is likely to strike most viewers as perfectly reasonable: we all assume that we have different identities than our siblings, despite sharing the same parentage


and, thus, quite similar baptismal circumstances. And yet the primary narrative trajectory of the film is to rewrite everything about those circumstances except the basic genetic fact of Marty’s parentage. When the film opens, Marty’s father George is unsuccessful, unhappy, and entirely under the thumb of his dim-witted boss, Biff (Tom Wilson). By the end of the film, young George’s experiences with Marty fundamentally change his self-confidence, leading him to become a successful writer in the original “present” of the film and to employ Biff to do menial labor. Within the film’s logic, this transformation of the circumstances of Marty’s birth and childhood is irrelevant to his identity and his place within the possible worlds of the film; any genetic change in Marty’s parentage, however, makes cross-world identification impossible and fundamentally severs the worlds of the old and new present. Although, in part, Back to the Future simply reflects contemporary American attitudes toward the importance of genetics and embryonic development,19 modern assumptions about narrative and possibleworld logic are very clearly revealed here. The moment of birth—with its reference to the apparently unique combination of genes from which an individual develops—is the starting point for narrative identity. Such a claim is certainly a departure from Kripke, for whom the moment of naming rather than some genetic essentialism is the basis of cross-world identity. But even in Back to the Future one would be hard-pressed to show a strong acceptance of genetics as the basis of identity. After all, the mature personalities of Marty’s parents are profoundly influenced by their psychological experiences as young adults and their economic conditions. Spielberg is not suggesting that genetics is the cause of his characters’ identities in this film—just as Kripke does not believe that genetics can somehow be used to mark individuals in their travels across worlds. Kripke and Spielberg both imagine this baptismal moment that defines the cross-world identity of individuals in similar ways. Both imagine what we could call an accidental moment, a point at which a new person is granted identity without connection to the past. Kripke is quite explicit about suggesting that this moment may well be mythical and imagined, since for him our ability to reference an individual depends not on our actually being able to trace a name back to a baptism, but our belief that we can. Likewise, in Back to the Future Marty disappears as a character when his parents temporarily drift apart despite the fact that genetically similar offspring will be born to one or the other of his parents. Individuals’ cross-world identities in this sense are unique products of the circumstances of parentage and birth exclusively. Genetic identity is one common justification for this uniqueness,


but neither filmmaker nor philosopher is willing to take genetics as a predictor of action or as a limit on the future. Rather, what drives the presentation of these possible worlds and what limits Spielberg’s ability to describe a Marty born to different parents is precisely the narrative limitations of our modern way of thinking about trans-world identity. Contextualizing Kripke Once we recognize that possible-world thinking depends on the moment of birth or naming as a reference point around which these worlds can be organized, a number of implications become obvious. As my brief discussion of Back to the Future suggests, there will be types of events and stories that will be difficult to imagine and to describe using such narrative models. We will examine these limitations of narrative later in this chapter. More fundamental to an understanding of narratology is recognizing that this image of the “starting point” for human identity in birth or naming is a relatively recent construction, depending in large part on a particular understanding of human biology. It is my contention that despite the apparently logical necessity of much of what Kripke claims, his theory rests on assumptions marked by particular historical conditions, the most interesting of which are those that concern the body and reproduction. By way of contrast to the kind of identity that Kripke imagines, let us consider for a moment how this issue is treated in a contemporary Native American novel like Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife. Late in the novel Erdrich notes, “Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves of generation to generation, across bloods and time. Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it. Here on the handle the vines and leaves of infidelities. There, a suicidal tendency, a fatal wish. On this side drinking. On the other a repression of guilt that finally explodes.”20 While Erdrich may seem merely to be suggesting some notion of genetic predisposition toward depression and alcoholism, it is clear in the novel that she has in mind a more complex process by which identities themselves are handed down with the traditional names that get reused. As one of her characters remarks not long after this passage, “Our spirit names, they are like hand-me-downs which have once fit other owners. They still bear the marks and puckers. The shape of the other life” (217). The identities of Erdrich’s characters are defined by their resonance with traditional, mythic types and familial patterns. Certainly this way of defining identity breaks from the European philosophical tradition in which Kripke works. Although in a good deal of modern fiction we find mythic,


psychological, and thematic patterns and resonances between characters, modern ideology suggests that identity is first and foremost an individual concern. Although it has been complicated by more recent histories, Ian Watt’s claim that the European novel begins with the birth of modern individualism describes why Erdrich’s narrative seems so foreign to mainstream ways of defining character identity and narrating a life. Traditionally, as Watt remarks, “the novel requires a world view which is centered on the social relations between individual persons”; Erdrich’s characters are defined by much more complex resonances with past identities.21 Erdrich makes clear that character identity can be defined in many different ways. Scholes and Kellogg are right to distinguish between typical and archetypical forms of characterization in their classic study, The Nature of Narrative. As they suggest, “Don Quixote is not a character as Isabel Archer is, or as George Eliot’s Dr. Lydgate is. He is alive but he is not real. There is more of myth and of fiction in Don Quixote than in Isabel Archer. There is more of mimesis in her. She may be quixotic, but he is Quixote. She may be typical, but he is archetypical.”22 Theories of narrative character, influenced either by reader-response theories or by semotics, usually treat such characters in terms of their qualities and place them within the overall work, rather than attending to their literary sources. Scholes and Kellogg suggest that Quixote does not arise, we can say, from Cervantes’s attempt to describe a particular person; rather, he is an attempt to embody a certain philosophical and psychological confusion. More generally, we can say, Scholes and Kellogg remind us that narrative frequently finds the inspiration for its characters elsewhere than in the real world. Indeed, narrative theory in general has failed to take sufficient account of practices in a great many periods, cultures, and genres in which the construction of unique and independent characters is not the goal of the writer. Although it is obvious to even casual readers that medieval romances like Le Morte D’Arthur and Troilus and Criseyde are rewritings of earlier tales, narrative theory frequently lets this essential fact pass in attending to other aspects of characterization. C.S. Lewis remarked in 1966, The truth is that these Middle English texts have come into existence by a process which is quite foreign to modern literature. The scholar’s ideal of accuracy in translation, the historian’s ideal of fidelity to a document, and the artist’s ideal of originally, are all alike absent from the minds of Laamon and Johan. In one way they seem enslaved to their originals; it never occurs to them to break these up and melt the slivers down and forge out of them an essentially new work. But in another way their

conceiving modern narrative / 31 treatment of them is very cavalier. They do not hesitate to supplement them from their own knowledge and, still more, from their own imagination—touching them up, bringing them more fully to life.23

Lewis suggests that some authors find their characters not in the “real world” or simply in their imagination, but also in other written or oral works. The identity of these characters is defined, at least in part, by their relationship to previous literatures and texts. In a sharp break from modern ideas about originality, it is in earlier narratives that these characters are born. We can say more generally that such premodern narratives have a fundamentally different notion of mimesis, and that this notion leads them to treat characters differently as well. As we know, authorship in the Middle Ages implied a very different notion of personal authority. Albert Russell Ascoli summarizes the traditional understanding of the etymology of the term author: [T]here was a long medieval tradition for defining the word auctor in relation, conceptual and etymological, to two other words: actor and autor. Actor comes from agere, “to do,” and refers to the one who makes a work, without reference to the authority or veracity of that work. Auctor comes from augere, “to augment or make grow,” and refers to one who is at once the originator of and the authenticating witness to an act (for instance, of composition).24

While modern definitions of mimesis tend to equate these two concepts—assuming that the artist or writer who makes a work is responsible for making it lifelike and believable—this is not necessarily the case in medieval writing. Ascoli notes this distinction: “medieval concepts of auctoritas shift away from the rhetorical notion of authority as the persuasive appearance of truth and toward the theological idea of an original, essential, and transcendent truth and power behind appearances from which all circumscribed human authority ultimately derives” (27). Evelyn Birge Vitz states this contrast even more strongly when she suggests that medieval narrative resists modern ways of thinking about authorship precisely because of the belief that the authenticating power behind the narrative is beyond the control or even understanding of the writer. Vitz writes, “to the medieval way of seeing things, one did not need human artistic intervention in order to have a story. God was the fundamental artist whom all other artists merely imitated. The dividing line between reality and art was very different for the Middle Ages than for the modern period.”25 Because of the belief that God has created


reality as a kind of artistic pattern that humans only barely grasp, Vitz goes on to note “the medieval conviction that every sequence of events which occurs is a ‘story,’ that all events have causality, meaning, finality: that every living creature has a function, though often known only to God” (112). According to such a way of thinking, reality and art are deeply interwoven, and the artist’s goal is not to create a narrative but merely to help reveal a pattern that already preexists the writing. It is because of this belief that narrative ultimately originates beyond the mind of the author that medieval narrative so frequently draws on traditional source stories and reworks older materials. Vitz notes, for example, that “it is often narrative in what one might call the ‘second degree’: it is not the telling of a story, but the retelling. And this is not that kind of collective commemoration of past events that one finds in epics, but rather a corrective retelling” (32). Indeed, many scholars writing about medieval narrative structure have noted that the cyclical and repetitive structure can be traced back in large part to the very different notion of origin operating within these texts. Jane H.M. Taylor, for example, notes the key role of cyclicity in medieval narrative, “by which I mean the construction of a pseudo-historical prose narrative against a conception of history as an organic process of birth, growth, apogee, decay and death, death triggering in turn the next rebirth and thus the next cycle.”26 Such “cyclicity” clearly emphasizes broader historical patterns that are not embodied uniquely in a single event nor invented by a writer, but rather revealed repetitiously through many historical and literary instances. The crucial point in the transition from an older method of imagining characters to what we can describe as modern possible-world thinking is most often located at some point in the Renaissance. William Ryding conveniently locates this moment in 1548, when the concept of narrative structure began to come under an Aristotelian critique that called for a movement away from cyclical histories to a formal understanding of beginning, middle, and end: “In the latter half of the sixteenth century there occurred in Italy what might be described as a crisis in the concept of narrative structure. The controversy raged in literary circles from 1548 until the end of the century. When it was over a revolution of sorts had been accomplished. The authority of Aristotle in matters of narrative form was firmly established as it was to remain down to our own times.”27 As my very brief discussion of mimesis and authorship has suggested, narrative structure clearly reflects an understanding of how a text comes into the world and claims authority for itself. Thus the transformation in structure described by Ryding


necessitates a change in understanding how narratives are conceived and claim authority for themselves. A concise summary of this transformation is suggested by Carla Freccero’s discussion of the opening passages in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Since such opening passages traditionally do the work of establishing the authority of the text and the origin of the characters, these two passages tell us a great deal about how authority is being imagined in the 1530s. Freccero notes that while Gargantua is narratively prior to Pantagruel and consequently that the two works are usually printed together in this order, the two works were in fact composed in the opposite order: Pantagruel appeared in 1532 and Gargantua in 1534. This small difference in date is important, since Freccero notes a very different approach to establishing the genealogy of the two figures. The earlier figure of Pantagruel is defined by reference to textual authority: Here the metaphor of a return toward origins, genealogical investigation, explicitly creates the text—it is the pretext by which the narrator achieves presence. The discourse, however, is metacritical: the narrator, not Pantagruel the hero or protagonist, is on a parental quest. Whereas classical and medieval traditions provide the foundation for the hero’s genealogical exploration, notably the search for the father, Rabelais transposes the discourse, from the start, to the level of the narrative itself, to the level of writing.28

Already, Freccero suggests, Rabelais is borrowing from the medieval notion of authority in an ironic way, integrating the very search for authority into the story itself. Still, even such an ironic treatment bears homage to the continuing presence of medieval notions of textual authority and narrative mimesis in this first book. When Freccero turns to Gargantua, published only two years later, she notes a far more direct focus on biological rather than textual ancestry, since Rabelais “situates Pantagruel in a line of descent and provides it (him) with a history in the form of a father whose authority determines the outcome of the son” (61). Biological genealogy here is used to suggest the problems of defining these characters’ identities much in the same way that literary genealogy fails Pantagruel: “The lineage claimed for the book (the retelling of a well-known tale) in one passage is denied in the next by the assertion that genealogies may disguise rather than reveal origins” (59). Rabelais’s book is, again, broadly ironic and satirizes much of the tradition that it draws from. Nonetheless, we can take the shift in the objects of Rabelais’s satire as a concise summary of the change in how narratives will define the identity of their characters.


As this example of Rabelais suggests, there is a quite close relationship between how characters are conceived, and how the narrative is seen to define its mimetic authority. In describing this as a matter of conception I am in one sense speaking metaphorically. Especially in medieval narrative I am referring to the way that characters are born out of a textual tradition that grants them an authority to reveal patterns within history and the world. At the same time, however, this notion of conception needs to be taken more and more literally as we move into the Renaissance. Rabelais certainly suggests this when the literal conception of Pantagruel becomes the basis for defining the authority of Gargantua. We can say that the transition from medieval textual “conception” (in a metaphorical sense) to modern biological conception (in a literal sense) is precisely what inaugurates the tradition of possibleworld thinking in modern narrative, and that creates an image of openended character futurity. Hans Vaihinger notes precisely this “transition to fictions” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as philosophy and science increasingly comes to depend on hypothetical situations—possible worlds—as a means of reaching conclusions.29 This is certainly not yet the case in Rabelais, nor will it really be the case well into the period of the early novel in Europe, where many characters are still assigned traditional identities or destinies that foreclose their future in a variety of ways. Nonetheless, we can see the beginnings of the modern novelistic tradition here, and the preconditions for thinking about narratives as future-oriented possible worlds being defined in this equation of narrative authority and character conception. By jumping ahead a few hundred years, we can see this transformation of narrative into a discourse of possible worlds being completed in a work like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), a novel that combines older ideas of human generation with a distinctly modern style of writing. A number of critics have noted that Shelley’s treatment of the Frankenstein monster as the product of her eponymous scientist’s imagination draws on an eighteenth-century understanding of how imagination influences the fetus.30 It was commonly believed in midcentury Britain that what a woman thought about during conception and pregnancy—and to a much lesser extent, what a man imagined during intercourse—could have a fundamental influence on the characteristics and even nature of the child that she produced. This culture’s willingness to give such formative power to the imagination comes out of a number of sources, but certainly one of the most important is the simple confusion that results from rapidly changing ideas about reproduction, which I will discuss in more detail in the following.


Dennis Todd has recently argued that imagination’s influence on a human embryo was particularly the site in which the period played out anxieties about the nature of human identity. Standing somewhere between the rational, spiritual mind and the animal body, imagination’s ability to shape a human child suggested the frightening prospect that human identity likewise has a physical rather than rational basis: “If humans had no immaterial substance, they had no identities at all. . . . To be an individual, to have an identity, meant that one had to possess a selfhood that was a unitary thing persisting through time, and therefore individual identity had to be grounded in a substance that was itself indivisible and unchanging.”31 Todd goes on to show that the power of the imagination reappears in the satire of the time constantly as a danger by encouraging an “enthusiasm” in which bodily excitement overwhelms reason and judgment. Swift’s Gulliver, for example, travels from one monstrous vision to the next, constantly being excited by the image but failing to profit by understanding it (150). Precisely this emotional but irrational “enthusiastic” response is what critics of the time feared that fictional narrative would encourage. Frankenstein is remarkable for taking this eighteenth-century concern about the power of the imagination and making it the basis for a new type of narrative. Critics have long recognized that this might well be the first Science Fiction novel, since it speculates on the implications of a hypothetical scientific discovery—the power to reanimate dead flesh. Science Fiction’s interest in the possibilities opened up by a particular speculative donnée makes it the prototypical modern narrative in its explicit and fundamental reliance of possible-world thinking. This type of novel emerges precisely by transforming the previous concerns about the power of imagination into the basis for telling the story. Like the social critics who worried about the power of the imagination to affect the fetus, in Frankenstein imagination is fundamentally linked to birth. Frankenstein’s imagination is, however, no longer a matter of literally influencing the gestation of a child, but rather a matter of metaphorically “birthing” a new world. Dr. Frankenstein, like Shelley herself, creates a new world out of his imagination precisely by creating a new creature. Picking up on the novel’s concern with authorship in both writing and birth, Barbara Johnson remarks, “Frankenstein . . . can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein. What is at stake in Mary’s introduction as well as in the novel is the description of a primal scene of creation. Frankenstein combines a monstrous answer to two of the most fundamental questions one can ask: where do babies come from? and where do stories come from?”32 We could say that


modern narrative makes precisely the same equation when it links the creation of a narrative “world” with the birthing of its character. Shelley, we could say, responds to problems and ambiguities in thinking about reproduction and in turn develops a different style of writing that takes birth as the beginning of a new, speculative style of writing. Mimesis and Sexual Generation I have suggested, then, that how we understand modern narrative mimesis comes to depend more and more on possible worlds as a model, and that this change occurs because of a shift in the way that we understand human identity. I would like to argue now for what I have hinted at throughout this chapter, that this understanding of narrative futurity can be traced back to a modern way of thinking about conception and fetal development. In jumping the nearly three hundred years that separate Gargantua and Pantagruel from Frankenstein, I have obviously played fast and loose with any kind of historical causality that might link specific scientific discoveries to these changes in narrative. Although a complete history of thinking about conception and fetal development is obviously beyond the scope of a project like this, I would like to outline the debate that occurred within embryology and to suggest its links to the way that thinking about human identity as an “accidental” combination of circumstance developed during the last part of the seventeenth and first part of the eighteenth centuries. It would be wrong to suggest that there is a single trajectory from ancient theories of generation to early scientific discoveries of conception and inheritance. Indeed, what is remarkable about the history of embryology is how frequently one catches glimpses of modern ideas about conception in much older texts, and how ideas are proposed, die out, and become resurrected in later generations. It is impossible to discuss theories of sexual generation without providing a preliminary explanation of the issue of how the fetus develops human form. Indeed, although a tremendous number of issues circulate through the history of embryology, the most consistent problem posed to philosophers and, later, to scientists is to understand how human shape develops from a bodily material (either male or female semen) that initially appears to have no such form. Early Greek theories start from the problem of how the apparently different elements of the body are generated from a seemingly undifferentiated seminal fluid. “How can hair come from not-hair, and flesh from not-flesh?” asks Anaxagoras in the fifth century B.C.33 Aristotle, of course, solves this problem by attributing to women the


seminal material out of which a fetus is produced, and to the man the shaping of that material: Now of course the female, qua female, is passive, and the male, qua male, is active—it is that whence the principle of movement comes. Taking, then, the widest formulation of each of these two opposites, viz., regarding the male qua active and causing movement, and the female qua passive and being set in movement, we see that the one thing which is formed is formed from them only in the sense in which a bedstead is formed from the carpenter and the wood, or a ball from the wax and the form. It is plain, then, that there is no necessity for any substance to pass from the male; and if any does pass, this does not mean that the offspring is formed from it as from something situated within itself during the process, but as from that which has imparted movement to it, or that which is its “form.”34

What is noteworthy here is not so much the solution that Aristotle provides, since his theory will be embraced and rejected in a variety of ways through Galen during the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, but the theoretical problem that will haunt embryology: how is the bodily material out of which the fetus develops (whatever its source) given shape and developed into a child?35 This issue frequently coalesces into the debate between “preformationism” and “epigenesis” as the two models for fetal development that dominated early modern thinking about sexual generation. This debate has attracted a great deal of attention recently by cultural critics because of what it says about the period, but I will keep my remarks to a few observations. Epigenesis describes what contemporary science has come to accept as the gradual development of the fetus through many different forms. Conversely, preformation theory argues that whatever material the embryo develops from, embryonic growth is merely a process of unfolding a form that is already complete within that material. This form can reside either in the female egg—a popular theory with the “discovery” of the egg by William Harvey in 1651—or in the male sperm, as was increasingly believed after the invention of the microscope in the 1670s. The result is a kind of running debate between which of the two parents provides the “form” of the future child.36 It should be easy to see why this theory is so attractive, since it does away with the issue of how “hair can come from non-hair”—that is, how elements of a fetus can develop from an undifferentiated seminal material. If such material already contains the form of the child, then fetal development is merely a process of allowing this form to manifest itself. Obviously,


however, this theory raises a number of very significant problems. Probably the most striking is the difficulty of explaining the fact that the child inherits qualities from both parents, a difficulty that did not keep philosophers and scientists from embracing some version of preformation. Other philosophical problems are more abstract but also more absurd. Probably the most obvious is the doctrine of emboîtement or encasement—the idea that if an embryo is already complete inside the egg or sperm, then that preformed embryo must in turn contain within itself the egg or sperm that itself contains an embryo, and so on, recursively. In his history of theories of sexual generation, F.J. Cole locates the first full articulation of the emboîtement doctrine to Jan Swammerdam in 1669. In summarizing the implications of this theory, Cole notes that Swammerdam’s later work in 1672 concludes that the whole human race was comprehended in the loins of Adam and Eve, and consequently the race will be faced with extinction when this original supply of germs is exhausted. Thus death, the penalty of sin, is implicit in the human race. It is evident that Swammerdam does not allow his mind to be disturbed by any considerations of consistency. Reasoning from his own observations he should be an ovist—the foetus is preformed in the egg, and the male parent has no direct share in it. And yet, he finds a use for Adam in generation. . . .37

Despite its logical problems, Cole notes that “from about 1674 the Preformation Doctrine was generally accepted, and it was only a question whether the miniature was in the egg or in the sperm (Ovism and Animalculism)” (53). It is not until the 1740s with the work of P.L.M. de Maupertuis that we have a theory that tries to account for what we would describe today as the genetic inheritance of traits from both parents, and theories that try to locate the form of the child in seminal material of one or the other parent recede.38 Modern readers of this debate are probably first struck by the abstract and scholastic nature of much of the inquiry into the development of the embryo. Howard Adelmann summarizes the writing about sexual generation precisely as a lack of scientific investigation and observation: In embryology, as in other fields, the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth were a period of transition. Some who worked during it were almost completely unable to free themselves from the old forms and were largely content to weigh the statements of their authorities one against the other when they were at variance, perhaps adding new “reasons” of their own in support of one or the other or, possibly, advancing an original hypothesis, but not systematically observing or

conceiving modern narrative / 39 experimenting to ascertain what their own senses might find to be the truth.39

As my summary of the early preformation doctrine has suggested, there is a great deal of validity in Adelmann’s characterization. Without doubt much of the writing of this period is marked by concern for inherited theories and philosophical abstractions at the expense of more direct observation of human development and anatomy. But Adelmann does a disservice to the writing on embryology of this period when he fails to recognize how fundamental a change in thinking about the body he is demanding of these writers. Jonathan Sawday has recently written about dissection in early modern medicine, and has suggested that the shift from taking the body as an emblem of the larger cosmos to seeing it as an object to be taken apart and studied has radical implications.40 Sawday writes Guiding the followers of Vesalius was the belief that the human body expressed in miniature the divine workmanship of God, and that its form corresponded to the greater form of the macrocosm. Such ideas did not vanish overnight, to be replaced by the clear light of Cartesian rationality. Indeed, William Harvey himself leaned on a system of beliefs inherited from Aristotle, which held that the universe and the human body—the interior and exterior worlds—were united in the common bond of correspondence. Within this system, features observed within the body were held to replicate features to be seen in the world at large.41

In contrast, Sawday notes, early modern scientists began to speak about the body as a space to be explored, equating the interior of the body with the dark “interior of the continent of the newly ‘found’ americas” (25). Modern scientific study of the body, then, marks a fundamental transition in the way that the body is made meaningful, and especially implies that we must give up the symbolic qualities attributed to the surface of the human form. Because the human form provides explicit analogies for the world, it is natural that early scientists would want to find those forms embedded in whatever materials the child develops from. To think otherwise is to imagine a fundamentally different starting point for human identity. In describing the early modern transition from a cosmological to a genetic understanding of the “starting point” for human identity, we are obviously returning to the concerns that I have associated with possibleworld theory. Earlier I suggested that an “accidental” quality to human genetic combination is deeply interwoven in contemporary ideas about


sex, birth, and identity upon which possible-world thinking depends. Consider for a moment Robert Silverberg’s comment on the somewhat unlikely subject of the representation of interspecies sex in Science Fiction: The essential thing to keep in mind about sex is that its inherent purpose is to bring two alien beings together to create a third being different from them both. I’m talking strict biology here, of course, taking things right down to the teleological nitty-gritty. Whatever sex may happen to mean to you or you or you or me, the inarguable fact remains that the whole sexual thing was programmed into most living organisms above the level of viruses and bacteria for the primary sake of bringing about an exchange of genetic material between two individuals who belong to the same species but otherwise may have very little in common. . . .42

Silverberg is eager to emphasize the “alienness” of these potential parents, but he describes sex and reproduction in terms that reflect our prevailing assumptions about human reproduction in general. Reproduction is a moment at which two significantly different creatures come together to conceive a new one that is “different from both.” An individual in this way of thinking about reproduction is an “accident” in some general sense: he or she is a product of two very different sets of genetic material that produce a new, unique creature. Early modern embryology quite explicitly struggles with the transition from a cosmological to what I am calling this accidental starting point for human identity. The resistance to this transition reflects a whole network of social and cultural ideologies,43 but the struggle at its most fundamental and far-reaching level is narrative in nature. Indeed, Sawday’s observation that the transition from older cosmological models is worked out in part through metaphors of geographical travel suggest how older metaphorical uses of the body are giving way to narratives of search and discovery. Ultimately this modern narrative style is most clearly embodied in Darwinian narrative, where the balance between a search for origins and the unlimited futurity of accidental starting points seems to me most clearly exemplified. Gillian Beer’s influential study of Darwin and narrative suggests that precisely this interest in futurity is what substitutes for the older assumption of some type of preformation. Noting that “[e]volutionary theory emphasised extinction and annihilation equally with transformation,” Beer suggests that this “disturbing” balance marks a change in narrative: “The all-inclusiveness of its explanation, stretching through the differing orders of the natural world,


seemed to offer a means of understanding without recourse to godhead. It created a system in which there was no need to invoke a source of authority outside the natural order: in which instead of a foreknown design, there was inherent purposiveness.”44 Futurity, the urge toward “difference, plentitude, multifariousness,” substitutes for older models of development that presupposed some form that gradually manifested itself. It is clear, then, that transformations in thinking about conception affected narrative in two ways. At the most general level, they mark a shift from belief in inherent, divinely inspired forms that manifest themselves over time—both in everyday life and in narrative. At a more specific level, these changes produce a new way of thinking about character identity as the basis for narrative. No longer are characters subordinated to some larger form; instead, they are the basic metaphysical building blocks of whatever story, whatever “world,” is described. Rethinking Accessibility Possible-world theory, then, poses special problems for critics, since it both claims a universal logical application and at the same time seems to arise as a mode of thinking only at a specific historical moment. The very idea of trans-world identity assumes the need to define a continuity between two separate but similar “worlds.”45 This seems true of most modern narrative. Although early European novels often tried to claim that individual works of fiction were actually found documents or collections of real letters, modern fictional narratives treat real and textual worlds as fundamentally distinct. It is only because of this distinction that the issue of fictionality itself arises. If a novel produces another, obviously untrue world that readers are invited to enter, writers are challenged to defend the value of such a flirtation with lies. This gap is precisely the one that Kendall Walton has in mind when he argues that artworks are a form of “make-believe,” a kind of imaginative acting out based on childhood play in which participants (readers, viewers, the audience) are aware of two realities. A child might imagine that a tree stump is a bear in order to develop a game with her friends and straddle the real world of the tree stump and the imagined world of the beargame, using the former to “prompt” additional play and “broaden our imaginative horizons”: “They induce us to imagine what otherwise we might not be imaginative enough to think of. It might not occur to me to imagine a monster sitting atop a mountain were it not for the influence of certain suggestive rock formations.”46 Likewise, in artworks we


move back and forth between the fictional world of the text and our real world, treating the characters, events, and other qualities of the artwork as the prompts for further imaginative play. But in the end, such play can only work if we remain firmly aware of the distinction between real and imaginative worlds. We have seen, however, that narrative before the eighteenth century by no means always relies on this distinction between two separate worlds. Is it really fair to say that Dante’s mixture of religious, historical, and literary figures creates a new, fictional world that is self-contained and that is entered when a reader picks up The Divine Comedy? Auerbach suggests something of the complexity of reference in Dante’s characterization when he notes the way that earthly existence “figures” eternal, divine designs: “The world beyond . . . is God’s design in active fulfillment. In relation to it, earthly phenomena are on the whole merely figural, potential, and requiring fulfillment. This also applies to the individual souls of the dead: it is only here, in the beyond, that they attain fulfillment and the true reality of their being. Their career on earth was only the figure of this fulfillment. In the fulfillment of their being they find punishment, penance, or reward.”47 Although in one sense Dante has invented most of the events of his narrative and thus created a “fictional world” in which historical events are represented and reshaped, in another sense Dante is merely revealing the “fulfillment” evident in these earthly events. In such narratives, the text does not create a fictional world distinct from the real world and mediated through relations of trans-world identity. Rather, both narrative text and earthly existence are partial revelations of a divine order. At the other end of the spectrum, folktales integrate with the everyday world in a variety of ways that modern fictional narrative traditionally does not. Folktales are usually communal and frequently purport to explain some natural phenomenon or historical mystery. When, for example, Rabelais describes Gargantua’s adventures in Paris, he makes a point of linking these events to specific historical questions that his narrative claims to explain: The people so pestered him, in fact, that he was compelled to take a rest on the towers of Notre-Dame; and when from there he saw so many, pressing all around him, he said in a clear voice: “I think these clodhoppers want me to pay for my kind reception and offer them a solatium. They are quite justified, and I am going to give them some wine, to buy my welcom. But only in sport, par ris.”48

With this, Gargantua urinates upon the crowd so generously, “they began to swear and curse, some in a fury and others in sport (par ris).”


Rabelais concludes the episode by using it to account for a historical mystery: “Hence it was that the city was ever afterwards called Paris” (75). Once we recognize that not all narratives will presuppose a distinction between two worlds, the way that much narratology characterizes the reader’s relation to the text must be questioned. Already Walton’s theory seems historically very suspect, since the belief that the world of the artwork is ontologically discontinuous with that of the real world does not apply to folktales and the kind of religiously inspired writing that Auerbach describes in Dante. An especially good example of this twoworld model is Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic theory. Goodman concludes his influential study, Ways of Worldmaking, with the characterization of artworks as “samples from the sea.” Goodman models aesthetic analysis on attempts to extrapolate general patterns from instances, to take a work as a sign of how the world in general functions. Goodman notes that scientific inquiry into the world depends on “fair samples” of natural phenomena or materials, such a sample being “one that may be rightly projected to the pattern or mixture or other relevant feature of the whole or of further samples.”49 Goodman then contrasts the analysis of the artwork to this scientific extrapolation: Works of art are not specimens from bolts or barrels but samples from the sea. They literally or metaphorically exemplify forms, feelings, affinities, contrasts, to be sought in or built into a world. The features of the whole are undetermined; and fairness of sample is no matter of shaking a barrel thoroughly or taking water from scattered places but rather of coordination of samples. In other words, rightness of design, color, harmonics— fairness of a work as a sample of such features—is tested by our success in discovering and applying what is exemplified. (137)

The aesthetic model here is clearly attuned to modernist art, with its emphasis on abstract and obscure patterns that need to be analyzed before meaning can appear. And yet Goodman’s aesthetics describe how we often treat literary works in general, especially narrative ones. Narratologists frequently ask about the “world” that a text projects, and frequently treat that world as an artifact whose rules need to be discovered. It is in his sense that Lubomír Dolezˇel describes a possible world within a narrative text as “not a random assemblage of entities; it is constructed in accordance with certain postulated global principles.”50 For him, narrative semantics seeks to “recover and to formulate the intrinsic meaning of narrative texts” (193). Precisely this idea that narrative is a puzzle, a “sample” from which rules must be postulated, is at the


heart of possible-world analysis of narrative; this in turn depends on the strict distinction between the real and fictional worlds, a distinction that this chapter has drawn into question. This distinction between two possible worlds is perhaps most clearly embodied when these theories discuss how possible worlds are “accessed.” Marie-Laure Ryan offers the following definition of how fictional worlds can be accessed: Since a text projects a complete universe, not just an isolated planet, two domains of transworld relations should be distinguished: (1) the transuniverse domain of the relations linking AW [Actual World] to TAW [Textual Actual World], and (2) the intraunivese domain of the relations linking TAW to its own alternatives (TAPW [Textual Actual Possible Worlds]). The relations of the first domain determine the degree of resemblance between the textual system and our own system of reality, while the relations of the second determine the internal configuration of the textual universe. Or to put it another way: transuniverse relations function as the airline through which the participants in the fictional game reach the world at the center of the textual universe, while intrauniverse relations make it possible for the members of TAW to travel mentally within their own system of reality.51

Ryan’s concluding description of the relation between real and textual worlds in terms of travel neatly summarizes the tendency within narratology to treat texts as creating separate worlds. For Ryan, as for all narratologists working on the issue of worlds, access is a matter of logical compatibility: are the rules of this textual world more or less the same as those of the real world? Precisely the same question is at work in Goodman’s broader aesthetic theory, where analysis of an artwork involves treating it as a “sample” and understanding the rules according to which it functions. In both Goodman’s and Ryan’s discussions, it is clear that a great deal of the challenge and fun of reading a narrative according to this possible-world theory is in exploring these relations, in deciding which rules from the real world apply, and which do not. As Walton describes it, narrative worlds here are a kind of game. As this example of accessibility makes clear, questioning possibleworld thinking means challenging both our conventional theories of mimesis—the relation between work and world—as well as the very principle upon which we experience these narratives. Earlier in this chapter narrative theorists like Vitz have suggested that entirely different ways of thinking about authorship and the reception of the work are at play within medieval narratives. In these older narratives the relation between the reader and the text is not a puzzle in the way that is


described by Goodman; there is no a priori problem of accessibility. This suggests, I think, a broader conclusion, that hermeneutics undergoes a fundamental transformation as we move into the modern period and accept possible-world thinking about narrative. The fundamental hermeneutic question about how we are to interpret a foreign text or artifact arises precisely because world and text are taken to be fundamentally separate. As Sawday has suggested, older cosmologies organized around the human body backgrounded hermeneutic questions by suggesting a fundamental homology between world, text, and self. Once scientists take the body as an artifact to be dissected and studied scientifically, these natural links begin to break down, and the hermeneutics of the text becomes a fundamental issue around which narrative theory will circle. Critics have seen similar interpretive problems appear when world/body links are severed in culture in general. John O’Neill has recently argued for the need for more anthropomorphism in contemporary culture “in order to resist the drift toward a mechano-morphic or prosthetic society in which the ordinary intelligence and sensibility of persons are rendered docile and passive.”52 I will argue in later chapters that the body constantly reappears when we try to speak about textual hermeneutics, and that such older models of corporeality continue to haunt narrative and narrative theory. For now, however, we should recognize that narratology’s broad belief that a text projects a separate world with specific accessibility relations ultimately applies only to modern narrative. We will see that narrative itself reflects the hermeneutic problems raised by the body and the way that it defines the relation between text and world. Limitations in Traditional Narrative As my discussion to this point has argued, possible-world thinking achieved cultural prominence only recently and partially as the result of changes in our thinking about human generation. Because of this recent origin of possible-world thinking, it is inappropriate to apply the concept to the analysis of earlier literatures except in very circumspect ways. To speak of a narrative “world” in Dante or Chaucer, I have suggested, is a misapplication of the term. While we may want to continue to use the term to refer to the ways in which the cultural, political, and philosophical mores of the time influence the work, the suggestion that these works conceive of the relationship between text and outside world like a modern narrative is, I have suggested, a mistake.


My comments about the body’s place within modern narrative worlds also have implications for contemporary narrative practices. In arguing that modern narrative typically begins from a moment of “accidental” birth at which an individual is given as a starting point for the construction of the text’s world, I am also suggesting that there may be topics and narrative situations that this modern style of narrative may have difficulty addressing. Let us return, again, to the problems faced by a writer who wishes to imagine that he or she has different parents. This goal of reimagining the circumstances of one’s birth—or rethinking the foundational moment for most narrative worlds—has its clearest expression in narratives concerned with racial identity. It is not difficult to think of narratives in which one imagines “What would it be like if I’d been born a man instead of a woman.” This, after all, is the subject of Woolf ’s Orlando as well as Science Fiction narratives like Samuel Delaney’s Trouble on Triton. That such examples come to mind rather easily is not surprising, since such counterfactuals do not fundamentally change the conditions of one’s birth—the circumstances of baptism are retained, even if one is likely to be given a different name. It is more difficult to imagine narratives in which one imagines a different race. We can certainly think of fantastic examples like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which a person is suddenly changed into a new creature. But in this situation, one’s identity is not really changed— rather, Gregor Samsa is treated primarily as a man trapped within a bug’s body, rather than as a person who must reimagine his identity as a bug.53 Exactly the opposite is the case in narratives in which characters imagine belonging to a different race. In fact, such narratives are quite rare—surprisingly rare, we might think, if we did not now recognize how much of modern narrative practice works against reconceiving a character’s birth. The first work of African American fiction, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), is usually considered a “passing” narrative. Johnson tells the story of a very light-skinned black man who as a child believes himself to be white, only to discover later in school that he is considered African American. For most of the novel this character identities himself as black, but late in his life begins treating himself as white. In the end, this character seems disappointed in his choice, closing the novel with the observation that “I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.”54 In this context it is clear that, although this character questions the way that he should define himself, Johnson sees himself him as black and uses that definition as the ground for the story as a whole—it is this character’s “birthright.” Although the narrative itself raises social and psychological questions about the way that this character should think about his life


story, the narrative problems raised by these questions are not allowed to enter into and upset the main narrative. These social and psychological questions have fascinated recent critics, who have largely failed to recognize how difficult it is to reconcile them to traditional narrative structure. Recent critics writing about such “passing” narratives see them as implicitly challenging the culture’s belief in fixed identities and conventional mores. Elaine Ginsberg summarizes well this current treatment of passing narratives in her introduction to a recent collection of essays on the subject: “the process and the discourse of passing interrogate the ontology of identity categories and their construction. For the possibility of passing challenges a number of problematic and even antithetical assumptions about identities, the first of which is that some identity categories are inherit and unalterable essences: presumably one cannot pass for something one is not unless there is some other, pre-passing, identity that one is.”55 Although Judith Butler’s work on the radical potential of different kinds of identity “performance” has made critics especially sensitive to the possibilities contained in passing narratives, Ginsberg’s reading of these narratives seems largely to miss the narrative limitations that shape such identity transformations. At the outset of this chapter I suggested that seemingly challenging subject matter (Evelina discovers who her father is) could be used to create a teleology that suppresses those challenges and instead insists that the character’s identity has always been implicit in the narrative. Likewise such philosophically challenging questions can be used to tell an ultimately reifying narrative. If, as I have suggested, modern narrative seems to create identities by pointing back to some baptismal moment, we are on considerably shakier ground if we seek to modify that moment and redefine the conditions of one’s birth.56 Valerie Rohy, writing in the same collection on passing narratives, captures some of these problems in her essay on Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room in which she finds an essential theme of misrecognition as the precondition for narratives about such subjects.57 According to Rohy, Baldwin continually emphasizes nostalgia and the desire to return to an origin: “If passing . . . invokes origins only to displace origins, the passing of the law itself is manifest in its nostalgia for a point of origin that, in fact, it has never known” (228). In other words, such passing narratives will express their anxiety about the origins that are necessary for their own textual construction. Giovanni’s Room expresses this anxiety by continually circling around the issue of nostalgia and by emphasizing the way in which its central character, David, seeks to recognize and misrecognize himself in others. Other narratives will express this anxiety in different ways.


A good example of the difficulty of fully coming to terms with the narrative problems raised by the radical reconception of character birth is Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye. Morrison’s well-known novel tells the story of Pecola, a young African American girl who desperately wants the blond hair and blue eyes that she has been taught to associate with beauty. In wishing for this physical change, Pecola is essentially asking to change her race. Within this simplistic summary of the novel’s plot, Morrison’s task is essentially similar to the kinds of passing and transformation narratives that I have been discussing. She must describe a character’s rebirth, rebaptism into new circumstances and a new identity that raises fundamental questions about trans-world identity. But Morrison does nothing of the sort—at least not directly. Although the novel closes with Pecola’s apparently delusional belief that she has been given her new eyes and that everyone at school now envies her, the issue of rebirth is handled not by literally granting Pecola a new identity. Indeed, the novel ends with the suggestion that Pecola has failed to escape from her world, and that her belief that she has been given new eyes has made her an object of mockery and fear rather than envy— “Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.”58 Morrison handles this issue of rebirth by having Pecola become pregnant by her father. Thematically this incestuous pregnancy is important and helps to account for the way that Pecola is treated when she returns to school, and becomes a way for Pecola’s friends to think about the hope and ultimate impossibility of Pecola’s dream of being reborn into new circumstances, of “chang[ing] the course of events and alter[ing] a human life” (150). As the narrator remarks, “More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals” (149). That Morrison chooses to write about this rebirth rather than attempting to accomplish the birth itself suggests how difficult it is to escape the narrative logic that defines characters by their birth. Narrative after Baptism We can observe, then, some instances in which modern narrative methods, which rely on a particular image of the human body to ground their negotiation of narrative worlds, encounter fundamental limitations in how they can think about alternative biologies. It is also clear, however, that our beliefs about the body and its genetic inheritance have changed radically in the last half century. When I have spoken about the “modern


body,” my model has primarily been an evolutionist one of simple parental genetic inheritance—a model that was available by the latter part of the nineteenth century. Certainly recent work on genetics, especially the Human Genome Project’s attempt to catalogue all human genes, has begun to replace this model. If we are beginning to develop a biology after the classical evolutionist model of accidental combination that I have suggested underlines realist narrative, should we not then begin to see a new type of narrative that negotiates the relationship between text and world in a new way? I am certainly not the first person to raise this possibility. Donna Haraway is the critic best known for asking how recent discoveries in human biology will affect the way that we tell stories. Haraway’s well-known suggestion about cyborg body becomes more meaningful in the context of my discussion of narrative worlds: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.”59 In this well-known passage, Haraway points to the cyborg as a “myth” with the potential to change how we look at historical reality and how we approach the task of changing our political and material conditions. The core of this transformation, according to Haraway, is a creature (the cyborg) that is more explicitly the product of myth and imagination. The cyborg is a creature that has been assembled—that has, in other words, a different sort of baptism. It is not an evolutionary body that is accidental, new, and distinct. Rather, it is a product assembled of many different parts. It is for this reason that Haraway describes cyborgian life as a means “through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world” (152)—cyborg narrative entities remind us of how they are being placed within a narrative, how they are being created as entities rather than dropping fully formed into our laps as biological accidents. When Haraway asks “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by our skin?” (178), she is asking precisely this question about where the body has come from, what relationships and qualities have been suppressed to form it. The cyborg is not merely a new “origin myth” but rather an image of origins as themselves constructed in the process of narration, a process that Haraway rightly recognizes runs directly counter to all of our biological assumptions about physical identity and human reproduction.


In William Burroughs’s writing—frequently described as “cyborgian” by critics—we can see how this post-evolutionary body fundamentally changes our ideas about narrative and fictional worlds. Among the many frustrating qualities of Burroughsian prose, one of the most striking is the repetition of scenes with slight variations. Within a given Burroughs novel, the same actions may be performed again and again—sometimes by the same characters, sometimes by different characters, other times by characters with the same name who may or may not be the same character that appeared under that name earlier in the novel. Burroughs’s later novel Cities of the Red Night (1981) uses this technique in a direct way, repeating the same stories in traditional narration, play acting, sexand drug-inspired hallucination, and the writing of a book called “Cities of the Red Night.” The result is a nexus of characters and events that reappear throughout the novel with slight variations but that seem, in the process, to be struggling to tell a single story. There are many reasons behind Burroughs’s use of this repetition, but surely one cause is the radically different idea of narrative identity that Burroughs is using. These characters are not born to live out one life by making choices and seeing the results. Nor do they even follow many different, possible lines of choice. This latter technique is used at times in contemporary fiction, probably most successfully in Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter,” where a number of mutually exclusive narrative lines surround the story’s donnée of a young girl babysitting children while their parents attend a cocktail party.60 In Burroughs’s fiction, however, we are not given characters who maintain their identity across these various possible futures. The characters themselves are changed by the narrative circumstances in which they appear. The post-evolutionary logic behind Burroughs’s radical narrative style is clear in his association of human life and the virus or parasite. The image of the virus occurs frequently in Burrroughs’s writing, most notably in its association with language. In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs suggests that human life itself is “viral”: “we are all tainted with viral origins. The whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism.”61 Most relevant for this discussion is the way that this viral definition of human life challenges our ideas about reproduction. Steven Shaviro untangles some of the implications of Burroughs’s viral metaphor: [Viruses] aren’t self-sufficient, or even fully alive; they always need to commandeer the cells of an already-existing host in order to reproduce. A virus is nothing but DNA or RNA encased in a protective sheath; that is to say, it is a message—encoded in nucleic acid—whose only content

conceiving modern narrative / 51 is an order to repeat itself. When a living cell is invaded by a virus, it is compelled to obey this order. Here the medium really is the message: for the virus doesn’t enunciate any command, so much as the virus is itself the command. It is a machine for reproduction, but without any external or referential content to be reproduced.62

Although this characterization of the virus in some ways emphasizes its autonomy, what is most significant is the way that it makes the body that carries it point back to this viral “cause” for reproduction. Even if the virus itself contains no content, no real message, it itself directs and drives the body that carries it. The virus, in other words, is the mechanical process that produces the body almost as an afterthought. This, it seems to me, is what Burroughs’s repetitious narrative style is getting at—an understanding of how the narrative body, the starting point for the fictional world, is itself the product of some far more important and fundamental process that has created and shaped this entity. Burroughs’s fiction exemplifies, I think, a post-evolutionary narrative form. Here the individual character body is no simple accident, no individual from which a myriad of possible worlds unfold. Instead it is a body that has been constructed according to some viral code. As we begin to think of the body as a particular combination of genetic material with its own logic and meaning, we may well begin to see more fiction in which the characters are not taken as independent but rather as the product of other forces that are themselves the “starting point” for the narrative. More significantly, in such a type of narrative can we speak about worlds at all? Are the narrative possibilities created by these codes themselves worlds? We have seen throughout that the concept of a narrative world depends on a certain notion of accident, a combination of human characteristics that creates a person who will serve as the unique reference point for linking possible worlds. Once we move beyond this starting accidental point, can we speak of worlds at all? Perhaps, then, the concept of the fictional world describes merely a theoretical presupposition of a two-hundred-year period of narrative that is already coming to an end. Narratology in this sense treats an object (narrative) defined by a particular although broad timeframe. This frame, in turn, is defined by the modern body that it represents.


CHAPTER 2 Sorted and General Character Bodies

Chapter 1 has argued that the way in which we think about human bodies is inherent to what we can take as the most basic and abstract element of narrative—the way that it conceives of mimesis, the relationship between text and world. Although narratologists have treated narrative as a more or less timeless form of discourse, we have seen that much of how we think about narrative depends on a particular set of ideas about human potential and identity. We have seen, further, that these ideas in turn depend on an understanding of human conception and generation that becomes recognizable only in the eighteenth century. In a broad way, our very understanding of the idea of narrative depends on a particular way of conceiving the human body. Narratology in this sense is a form of discourse that is deeply entwined with the modern body. In this chapter I would like to turn from these abstract concerns toward more typically concrete narratological issues. In particular, I would like to focus on the role of the human body in characterization. When we imagine a corporeal narratology, we are most likely to think about a theory of character bodies, since it is through characters that our ways of thinking about the human body will most obviously influence narrative. This chapter considers, then, how bodies help to make characters significant. Turning to characterization is especially informative because these theories reflect a more typical narratological interest in concrete textual choices and possibilities. In particular, many people think of narratology as primarily a taxonomic discipline, categorizing textual features and providing schema for organizing those features. As we begin to develop a theory of the body in narrative character, we will construct a schema of the possible forms of narrative bodies. Along the way, this inquiry into bodies in narrative characterization will lead us into interpretive issues as well. In chapter 1, I suggested that the emergence of the human body as an object to be dissected and interpreted


should be read against the older tradition of symbolic links between the body and the world. While developing a theory of narrative bodies in characterization we will find that narratology has again relied on a historically limited understanding of the body as an object of analysis. We saw in chapter 1 that these historical reflections lead us to find general hermeneutic issues that a corporeal narratology raised. We will see the same thing when we consider narrative characters, where interpretive problems raised by the taxonomy of characters will ultimately be resolved only by broadening our understanding of the human body in narrative and by considering how these character bodies mediate between text and reader. Theories of Character To understand the place of the human body within theories of narrative character, we must first define what we can call the normal science of narrative character. That is, how have narratologists usually approached characterization, and what are their primary assumptions about character? We learn a great deal about the presentation and use of character traits in a narrative in W.J. Harvey’s classic study, Character and the Novel (1965). Although Harvey’s study seems dated in places—his principle polemic is against New Criticism’s lack of interest in character—it provides us with a rare effort at theorizing precisely those ideas about character that we take for granted in most interpretive work. Harvey’s overall definition of character uses the commonplace image of a “web” of human relationships: By far the most important of contexts [for viewing characters] is the web of human relationships in which any single character must be enmeshed. So much of what we are can only be defined in terms of our relations with other people; indeed, if we wish to be rigorous, we can say with the philosophers that other people must exist if only to show us what we ourselves are not.1

As Harvey suggests, usually we think about literary characters in terms of their contrasts to each other. This is true of theories of literary characters from very different critical schools and perspectives. David Lodge, for example, argues that we should subordinate traditional questions of character morality and thematic coherence to the language of the narrative itself, suggesting that when we read any novel “we enter a unique linguistic universe; we learn a new language designed to carry a particular view of experience.”2 Other critics have gone to the opposite extreme, suggesting

sorted and general character bodies / 55

that narrative characters be read essentially like individuals. Seymour Chatman is a defender of the equation between characters and persons, arguing that “[t]he same principle [by which we respond to narrative characters] operates with new acquaintances: we read between their lines, so to speak; we form hypotheses on the basis of what we know and see; we try to figure them out, predict their actions, and so on.”3 Clearly Lodge and Chatman have very different attitudes toward the role that character plays in narrative, and even toward the nature of narrative itself. Nonetheless, both agree that literary characters function primarily by contrast with each other. For Lodge, this contrast is seen primarily in patterns of language; he writes of “a linguistic thread or threads—a cluster of images, or value-words, or grammatical constructions” (79).4 For Chatman, characters embody an ordered and limited set of traits that are worked out through the course of the narrative, implying that individual characters are meaningful because of the contrast between their various combinations of these traits. Chatman defines his “open” concept of character as a “paradigm of traits; ‘trait’ in the sense of a ‘relatively stable or abiding personal quality’ ” (126). He characterizes this paradigm as follows: “The paradigmatic view of character sees the set of traits, metaphorically, as a vertical assemblage intersecting the syntagmatic chain of events that comprise the plot” (127). The contrast between characters has been used to explain narrative meaning in many different ways by critics. Intuitively we recognize that characters must contrast on some grounds; that is, the juxtaposition of several characters within a single work is structured on some thematic, psychological, metaphysical, ethical, or social ground. When we reflect on a work, we consider which qualities of these characters might be significant for the work. This theory of literary characters depends, of course, on a whole formalist belief in the importance of internal, usually binary, contrasts between elements of a literary text. Mieke Bal offers, somewhat apologetically, a structuralist theory of semantic axes in order to explain how “we decide which we consider provisionally to be a character’s relevant characteristics and which are of secondary importance.”5 Echoing Chatman’s language of paradigms and selection, Bal tentatively describes characters through systems of “semantic axes,” pairs of contrary meanings that reveal themselves to operate within a significant number of characters: Characteristics like “large” and “small” could be a relevant semantic axis; or rich–poor, or man–woman, kind–unkind, reactionary–progressive. The selection of the relevant semantic axes involves focusing, out of all the characteristics mentioned—usually an unmanageably large number—only

56 / narrative bodies on those axes that determine the image of the largest possible number of characters, positively or negatively. Of the axes which involve only a few or even one character, only those are analysed which are “strong” (striking or exceptional) or which are related to an important event. (126)

Bal notes a number of limitations with this model, among which is the simplification of the degree of contrast and the problems with the binary model of semantics in general. Still, Bal describes directly a model of character contrast that we find implicitly used by so many writers discussing in narrative theory. James Phelan’s influential recent study of character, Reading People, Reading Plots, repeats this emphasis on thematic contrasts while at the same time striving to state our common understanding of characters in the simplest way possible. Phelan distinguishes three components of fictional character: the synthetic (the fact that the character is fictional and hence constructed of language), the mimetic (the way that a character describes a “possible person”), and the thematic. Phelan describes the thematic component of an example character drawn from David Lodge’s criticism as follows: this character “is taken as a representative figure, as standing for a class—the individual in modern society, men, the ordinary human, respectively—and his representativeness then supports some proposition or assertion allegedly made by Lodge through his text.”6 As Bal and Phelan suggest, character becomes meaningful because it instances a larger textual system; the contrasts between characters allow us to glimpse the complexity of that system and to recognize the various forms that it can take. As Bal’s hesitant use of the model implies, contemporary critics have found it very difficult to escape from the structuralist logic that underlies the theory of contrasting character qualities. Bal’s reticent theory of semantic contrasts in narrative character summarizes the state of normal narratological criticism as applied to character. While critics seem to recognize that a model of simple logical contrasts is problematic, narratology’s way of approaching these texts does not seem to allow for an alternative. This model of semantic contrasts describes both the strengths and weaknesses of narratology’s treatment of characterization, and suggests where a corporeal narratology will need to adapt itself and to challenge its assumptions. To develop a narratology of the body in characterization is first to define the body as an object that enters into a system of semantic contrasts. We need to recognize eventually that something important seems to escape from this definition of character, and we will need to broaden our definition of corporeality to recover what that is.


The Body as a Narratological Object Before the body can contribute to the semantics of narrative, it must be defined as a meaningful object. It is because we see the body as a distinct entity that we are able to place it within the whole schematic of contrasts that Bal describes. Mary Douglas titled her influential work on the body in society Natural Symbols, a title suggesting a paradox in the way that the body becomes meaningful: “The title of this book would seem to hold a contradiction. Nature must be expressed in symbols; nature is known through symbols which are themselves a construction upon experience, a product of mind, an artifice or conventional product, therefore the reverse of natural.”7 Douglas goes on to argue that the body is “capable of furnishing a natural system of symbols” (xxxii), since the body provides the first and simplest analogy for thinking about “the social relation of men [that] provide[s] the prototype for the logical relations between things” (xxxi). Despite cultures’ universal access to the body as a model, and despite the frequency with which the body is used as a prototype for these relations, the body must be instilled with a specific set of meanings before it can take on a role in culture. Douglas’s observation about the body in culture applies, I think, to narratology as well. Although we recognize that it is impossible to tell a story without drawing on human bodies and thus entangling corporeality within the narrative, those bodies must always be shaped into meaningful textual objects by specific choices made by the text. Concern for how the body is endowed with meaning within a narrative will usually touch on systems of meaning that extend far beyond the text itself. As Bal notes, “everything that can be said about the structure of fabulas [story ‘elements’] also bears to some degree on extra-literary facts. Various investigators in this area even refer to themselves as anthropologists or sociologists, and work not only on literary narratives but quite often on folk tales, rituals, and common cultural practices such as table manners, recipes, and political programs” (177–78). We must first ask, then, how a narrative gives meaning to the human body, while realizing that this method will depend on the larger culture out of which this narrative arises. The body is shaped not merely by thematic or cultural influences, but also by the specifically narrative terms in which the writer is representing the body. That is, authors’ choices in the representation of body are delimited by typically narrative concerns like the need to present a narrator, to describe a setting, and to make action meaningful. These concerns will appear again at various points throughout this book, and will inevitably influence a discussion of characterization to some extent. In this chapter, however, I would like to focus as tightly as possible on


the specific question of the way that bodies are shaped to be part of a system of meaningful contrasts for semantic and thematic purposes.8 If character bodies become meaningful by being individuated into meaningfully distinct objects, then we can describe four types of relations that must be defined. Distinguishing Bodies from Other Objects It may seem obvious, but for bodies to be made meaningful by a narrative, they must be distinguished systematically from those things that are not bodies. This initial, non-semantic distinction underlies all narrative choices that follow. In the case of realistically presented humans, the narrative process by which bodies are sorted from nonbodies will usually be invisible. But when we begin to consider narratives with less traditional narrative entities, we realize that this invisible system is at work within all narratives. Marge Piercy’s science fiction novel He, She and It makes this point well. At the heart of this novel is a fairly simple dramatic donnée: a young woman, Shira, falls in love with a very human-like robot named Yod. The relationship not only becomes the basis for thinking about gender relations, since Yod him/itself is significantly the product of both male and female designers, but about what a body is. Shira, wonders, for example, “what did it mean to speak of a machine as having sex at all? Surely it did not urinate through its penis, and what would it want to have sex with, presuming a machine could want, which she was not about to assume. . . . ‘[W]ant’ was a word based in biology, in the need for food, water, sleep, the reproductive drive, the desire for sexual pleasure.”9 Pondering her body’s reactions leads Shira to question what should count as a body; she wonders at one point if the house she inhabits should not be considered in some sense a body (48). Piercy’s novel clearly stands on the boundary between several different definitions of the human body—as the seat of human sensation, as the material support for consciousness, as the object of human passion.10 Our difficulty in knowing how to read the novel comes from our inability to decide whether Yod’s body counts as a human body. Is this the story of an illicit but emotionally valid human relationship? Is this a cautionary tale about the human dependence on technology and our loss of understanding of our own bodies? As this example suggests, one of the essential conditions for meaningful narrative is to sort bodies from nonbodies. The way a narrative chooses to make this distinction will depend largely on the historical and cultural context out of which it comes. Narratives frequently distinguish bodies from nonbodies in terms of


animation—a body is different from objects like tables and chairs because it acts on and responds to the environment. Likewise, narratives commonly define bodies as the seat of consciousness. Stephen Dedalus’s childhood body, for example, leaves impressions on his mind that will shape his later ways of thinking, so that the water images from childhood of wetting the bed or of being pushed into a ditch later produce an antipathy toward bathing. How narratives develop this distinction between bodies and nonbodies will depend not only on the culture out of which they arise but also on the role bodies will play in a narrative. In contrast to the importance given a dead body in a play like Sophocles’s Antigone—where a dead body continues to be a body endowed with cultural and familial significance—we might note the complete lack of interest in such bodies in most contemporary popular action films and adventure stories, where the bodies of the dead antagonists are rarely accorded significant attention. In these narratives bodies are meaningful primarily because they participate in the drama of danger and chase. Once the characters are dead, their bodies are inanimate and thus, narratively at least, no longer bodies at all. The contrast between bodies and nonbodies is an especially rich but relatively unexplored area of narrative poetics. Narratives seem to be interested not merely in the gray areas between the two, but in categories beyond both. In Mason and Dixon Thomas Pynchon describes Mason’s experience of traveling on a meat ship, and the thinking about the dead body that results: “Here were the Representatives of ev’ry sheep he had ever spoken ill of,—and now he was at their Mercy. But they are dead, he told himself. Aye, but not only dead. Here was a category beyond Dead, in its pointless Humiliation, its superfluous Defeat,— stripp’d, the naked faces bruis’d and cut by the repeated battering of the others in this, their final Flock, they slither’d lethally ’round him.”11 Pynchon’s narratives are regularly populated by figures that straddle the line between life and death, body and nonbody—ghosts, angels, robots, and institutions. It may be that this fascination with the line between body and nonbody is a particularly postmodern concern.12 It may also be that narratives so often concern themselves with such problematic cases because they are anxious to police the borders upon which their storytelling depends. Indeed, Peter Schwenger has recently argued that reading means experiencing a kind of ghostly fantasm, and that such complex corporeality is therefore inherent to reading.13 And, certainly, it is true that one of our most basic types of narrative is the ghost story, where a problematically corporeal body is the organizing principle for plot. The ghostly body in Hamlet quite literally prompts the narrative.


By violating the rules of body and action—by providing information that Hamlet should not know and that Claudius thought safely hidden—the ghost creates a dramatic tension that must be resolved during the course of the play. This distinction between bodies and nonbodies not only underlies the organization of many conventional plots, but also has a crucial role in a narrative’s system of action and knowledge. Only by sorting bodies from nonbodies are narratives able to create a variegated structure of public and private spaces, organize moments of reflection and secrecy, and so on. John Bender’s study of the relationship between early British novels and the penal system suggests something of this relationship: The old prisons socially inscribed the principle that the true order of things had to be discovered through discord (discordia concors), and that final causes lay hidden beneath appearances. Romance narratives—by their magical strategies and implicit causes—bore this cultural fiction in literary form. The novel bears another fantasy entirely, that of a reality constituted from material causes. It articulates reality within a fine network of visible, observationally discoverable causes which are the motor factors of the narrative itself, for example, the internal forces of psychological motivation, the details of perceptual experience, the “natural” requirements of physical survival, the social demands of law and decorum.14

Bender goes on to suggest that the modern British novel depends on both the isolation of individuals from others for the purpose of selfreflection, and the ability to observe characters even in these isolated spaces. As Bender writes, “in confinement, the internal forces of psychological motivation fuse dynamically with the physical details of perceptual experience” (43). Crucial to the development of this narrative style is an inanimate space in which individuals are free from exterior influences. Other narrative styles—we might think of children’s stories in which animals are free to travel to and from prison cells or in which inanimate objects might spring to life—obviously do not construct such isolated spaces. Before a body can be given meaning, then, it must be contrasted to all other objects that are not to be considered bodies. Although this distinction is usually invisible—except in the kind of contemporary fiction that I have made frequent reference to here—the implications of particular ways of individuating bodies resonate within the whole narrative structure of the story. We can say that this preliminary stage of individuation in many ways has far more profound effects on the narrative


than the more visible and obvious ways in which it is invested explicitly with semantic meaning. Sorting Body Types In addition to deciding what will count as a body, every narrative implicitly or explicitly defines a certain range of body types. It is at this point that character bodies primarily enter into semantic relations, since by sorting bodies into types a narrative defines the contrasts that underlie thematic, symbolic, and psychological patterns. We are usually most aware of bodies being sorted into types in racist narratives, where skin color directly relates to such qualities as intelligence and strength of character. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, for example, tells a story of a “royal slave” primarily by distinguishing the body of the admirable Oroonoko from those of other black characters in the novel. In particular, Oroonoko is associated with white body characteristics in every way except his skin color: “His Nose was rising, and Roman, instead of African and flat. His Mouth the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turn’d Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole Proportion and Air of his Face was so nobly and exactly form’d, that bating his Colour, there could be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome.”15 Behn distinguishes Oroonoko from all other Africans precisely because he shares the best qualities of the European body type. The sorting of characters into such body types is one way the body enters into the semantics of the narrative and helps to support the process of characterization. Body sorting demands some overall principle for distinguishing between types of bodies. In many cases, the principle is a political schematic explicitly racist—as in the notion that lighter skins imply intelligence and greater degrees of civilization. It may also be more implicitly racist or classist by defining a set of social norms against which physical deviations become meaningful, as in Lombroso’s anthropometric search for signs of latent criminality. Equally political is sorting bodies by some notion of health, where particular body flaws are taken to signify moral or psychological lack—as, for example, Shakespeare’s Richard III, who is “Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up.”16 Behind such distinctions there is always, of course, an implied understanding of what makes a body healthy and by what means illness or deformity come into the world—means that can include everything from Divine messages to failures of hygiene.17 Even within the context of illness, the way that disease is imagined varies


a great deal by culture and by narrative usage. Susan Sontag has recently noted the different metaphors that tuberculosis and cancer give rise to, commenting that “[w]hile TB takes on qualities assigned to the lungs, which are part of the upper, spiritualized body, cancer is notorious for attacking parts of the body (colon, bladder, rectum, breast, cervix, prostrate, testicles) that are embarrassing to acknowledge.”18 Sontag implies that particular illnesses will not only have certain thematic and moralistic inflections but that different ways of thinking about illness will lead to specific narrative uses. Thomas Mann, for example, is able to use tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain not just to characterize particular people in the story—in fact, we meet a wide range of characters in the story all suffering from similar diseases—but rather to create a certain kind of isolated setting and a plot devoid of involvement in everyday political concerns. Body sorting, however, may also obey less politically charged semantic patterns. One broad cultural model of body types deployed in many Renaissance narratives is the division of personalities into those influenced by one of the four humours said to circulate through every human body. It is in this way that the humours are described in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor: So in euery humane body The choller, melancholy, flegme, and bloud, By reason that they flow continually In some one part, and are not continent, Receiue the name of Humours. Now thus farre It may, by Metaphore, apply it selfe Vnto the generall disposition: As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers In their confluctions, all to runne one way This may be truly said to be a Humour. But that a rooke, in wearing a pyed feather, The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe, A yard of shooetye, or the Switzers knot On this French garters, should affect a Humour! O, ’tis more then most ridiculous.19

As this passage makes clear, the language of humours can describe either inborn biological qualities—which here “may be truly said to be a Humour”—or to social pretension or self-indulgence. For Jonson, these humours function most effectively, then, as a catalogue of contemporary vice: “my strict hand / Was made to ceaze on vice, and with a gripe /


Squeeze out the humour of such spongie natures, / As licke vp euvry idle vanitie” (p. 433; ll. 143–46). While such a model has social and political implications, the sorting of bodies by these individual humours is not itself a matter of sorting into political groups. The most pervasive way in which bodies are sorted is of course by gender. It is a critical commonplace today that in the nineteenth-century novel, women are marked as frail, private, and interior in order to define men as public and active. The semantic use of this kind of gender distinction is nicely exemplified at the end of Barchester Towers, where Trollope describes the relationship between wife and husband using the metaphor of ivy clinging to a wall: “When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper. They were not created to stretch forth their branches alone, and endure without protection the summer’s sun and the winter’s storm. Alone they but spread themselves on the ground and cower unseen in the dingy shade. But when they have found their firm supporters, how wonderful is their beauty; how all-pervading and victorious!”20 Here an image of physical frailty becomes an essential part of the semantics of this novel—the contrast between weak but beautiful women and supporting men—which in turn provides the basis for the plot’s movement from tribulation to resolution and stability. Obviously, gender differences can be endowed with semantic meaning within individual narratives in many other ways. The Body and the Outside World Not only must a narrative decide what counts as a body and what kinds of bodies are possible within that narrative world; it must also determine how the body interacts with what is outside of it. This includes other human bodies as well as the surrounding environment—narrative space, objects, and natural forces. This body/world relationship is important because it affects how distinctly individual character bodies are imagined. If, as I have suggested so far, bodies must be distinguished from other types of objects and integrated into a semantic scheme, the ways in which those bodies participate within larger systems can vary a great deal from narrative to narrative. Nonetheless, the question of how separate bodies are from the outside world will affect the way that these semantics are interpreted. Like other aspects of the body in narrative, the system relating body and environment is usually invisible, taken for granted by readers and critics as part of the cultural background for the story. Historians and anthropologists have frequently noted that social space is modeled on


the human body, and it should be no surprise that all narratives implicitly or explicitly describe the “fit” between individual body and the larger space in which it operates. A good example of this modeling of extra-bodily objects and spaces using the human body is provided by Richard Sennett in his discussion of the history of the European city. Sennett notes for example the scientific revolution that William Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628) sparked with the discovery of blood circulation and the function of the heart. Such scientific discoveries were brought to bear on personal and public space in the rapidly developing urban environment. Doctors began to council the importance of the circulation of blood and allowing the skin to “breath,” ushering in a movement toward looser clothing and lighter fabrics.21 Likewise, cities were designed with circulation and movement in mind as the fundamental conditions of civic health. Narratives obviously face a similar choice in how closely they link world and body. We might think, for example, of the difference between narratives in which characters are strongly influenced physically by their environment and those in which a character is defined largely apart from physical interaction. As an example of this distinction we might contrast those modernist narratives that emphasize solipsistic character psychology at odds with the world around it—one thinks here of James or Conrad more than Joyce or Lawrence—with a naturalist novel whose characters conform physically to the fabric of the society in which they live. We can certainly think of narratives in which the body is used to speak about the relations between characters idiosyncratically rather than through schema popular within the culture as a whole,22 but all narratives would seem to need some understanding of the interaction of bodies and a larger space.23 These world/body relations affect the narratives that deploy them by placing the semantic contrasts between characters into an essential interpretive context. To return to the example above, the meaning of a character within a naturalist novel will be quite different from one within a modernist novel, precisely because of differences in the way that each type of work imagines the relationship between world and body. Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse treats men and women in fundamentally different ways precisely by separating them spatially, frequently noting the gaps between their perspectives on a given object or situation. To interpret the differences between Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay, for example, is in part to think about the different types of bodies they occupy. Mrs. Ramsey is described at various points as a kind of blank reference point: There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself

sorted and general character bodies / 65 did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity.24

In contrast, Mr. Ramsay is described by how strongly he physically occupies space. The novel remarks at the very outset “the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence” (10), and returns at many points to the kind of force that his body exerts upon social situations.25 Here bodily contrast is pronounced because Woolf assumes that the characters themselves are radically separated; our interpretation of these contrasts follows from the way in which space literally separates the characters much like Lily Briscoe composes the distinct elements of her painting. Something quite different occurs when we interpret naturalist novels like those of Frank Norris. Norris’s short story “Fantaisie Printaniere,” which became the basis for his well-known novel McTeague, is especially explicit about the corporeal logic of his writing. The two main characters of the story are introduced in very physical terms: [Ryer] was a small, lean, pinkish creature, like a split carrot, his mouth a mere long slit beneath his nose. When he was angry his narrow eyes glistened like streaks of bitumen. McTeague was a huge blonde giant, carrying his enormous fell of yellow hair, six feet and more above his ponderous, slow-moving feet. His hands, hard as wooden mallets, dangled from arms that suggested twisted cables. His jaw was that of the carnivora.26

Norris goes on to describe how both men physically abuse their wives, “McTeague on the days when he was drunk, which were many, Ryer on the days when he was sober, which were few” (64). The intertwined but contrasting bodies of the two men run throughout the story, which describes how they argue and then are reconciled at the expense of their wives: “Heretofore it had been the men who were enemies and their wives who were friends. Now the two men are fast friends, while the two women maintain perpetual feud. The ‘block’ has come to recognize their quarrel as part of the existing order of things” (75–76). Bodies in this story contrast much like those in Woolf’s novel, but they are deeply entwined with each other and with the outside world. The corporeal contrasts of Norris’s characters form part of the “existing order of things” in a way that the bodies of Woolf’s characters do not. To insist on the strict contrasts between characters is then a mistake, because the corporeal contrasts


that we notice here must be seen against a larger pattern at work within the novel. Degree of Embodiment One final way that narratives must define character bodies is according to the degree to which individuals are embodied. I have just suggested that character bodies must not only be sorted into semantic patterns, but must be defined in terms of how deeply individuated they are. The degree of embodiment within narrative character is in many ways a corollary to this issue, since it describes how closely we should associate characters with these bodies. The potential distance between body and character is an element of the interpretation of a narrative just like the potential distance between the viewpoint of a narrator and that of the author. It is frequently noted that women and ethnic minorities are more typically associated with their bodies than are men in the ethnic majority. Lindon Barnett summarizes how this contrast plays out in African American slave narratives: “Whereas the black body is understood in the redundant terms of its own materiality, the white body is understood as referential, in other words as significant and meaningful.”27 Likewise, feminist critics have long been aware that women are more routinely associated with their bodies than men are. Men are allowed to occupy an abstract and unmarked body because, as Beauvoir noted long ago, “A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.”28 As Beauvoir argues, cultures have always recognized some of its members as the norm—as “Self ”— and some as its Others, and marked those Others as embodied in a way that need constantly to be explained. “Man superbly ignores the fact,” writes Beauvoir, “that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it” (xv–xvi). While some of these differences arise because of assumptions within the culture out of which the narrative is produced, there are important ways in which the issue of embodiment reflects particularly narrative concerns. In chapter 5, I will discuss how what I will call “differential embodiment” functions to create narrative authority. Even within the context of the semantics of character, we should recognize that the degree of embodiment will play an important role. Consider the way that we are led to interpret two cosmetically similar stories—the slave narratives


of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs. Both authors occupy bodies that white culture sees as heavily embodied, and both tell stories in which these bodies provide the essential narrative situation of the characters—the need to escape an area of the United States where they are enslaved because of the color of their skin. Critics, however, have long noted that embodiment plays a very different role in these two stories. Douglass describes slavery as a condition violating a freedom that is essential and universal. As Douglass remarks famously to the ships at dock in Chesapeake Bay, “Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute!”29 Douglas tells a story of a natural progression “upward” in which growth toward manhood is treated as naturally inheriting freedom: “I began, with the commencement of the year, to prepare myself for a final struggle, which should decide my fate one way or the other. My tendency was upward. I was fast approaching manhood, and year after year had passed, and I was still a slave” (91). Jacobs’s narrative, in contrast, far more resolutely embodies her heroine Linda Brent. Brent cannot achieve the simple freedom that Douglass strives toward because she has links and responsibilities to her children, which she cannot leave behind as part of a natural maturation. As Jean Fegan Yellin remarks in her introduction to the novel, “Linda Brent dramatizes her flight for freedom within the context of her family’s active support. Despite terrible danger, grandmother, uncle, aunt, brother, even (she later learns) son and daughter—aid and abet her concealment and escape. Further, she presents her own efforts and those of her family within the larger configuration of an ongoing struggle for freedom by an entire black community.”30 The degree of embodiment as represented in these two novels must be interpreted in fundamentally different ways. While Douglass encourages us to adopt a disembodied perspective in evaluating the way that his skin color leads him to be treated, Jacobs handles embodiment in no such ironic way. Although she certainly accepts the idea of universal freedoms, her characters do not achieve this by transcending their bodies. In this way, interpretation of both these novels depends not just upon contrasts of how embodied various characters are but also upon how we are encouraged to think about embodiment itself. Character and Exteriority The discussion that I have developed in this chapter follows what I have described as the normal science of narratology. That is, it obeys the


general assumptions of narratology’s treatment of character, following its emphasis on semantic contrasts and accepting its treatment of characters as distinct objects to be given meaning within a text. And in doing so, I hope, this discussion has raised a number of issues that can improve these traditional theories. Although narratologists have frequently treated claims about the impact of social and cultural assumptions on the semantics of the text with suspicion, my discussion makes clear, I hope, that the basic ways in which textual objects emerge depends on a whole host of cultural as well as aesthetic concerns. We cannot talk about a textual object without talking about how objects are defined according to the cultural and aesthetic logic of particular texts. I would like now to consider the assumptions about the human body at work even within this rather abstract definition of character. As I argued about fictional worlds, I believe that this normal science of the narratology of character depends on a particular and limited image of human corporeality. In chapter 1, I showed how possible-world thinking depended on a particular way of understanding human conception as the “accidental” originary basis upon which the future-oriented structure of these worlds could be organized. I think that there is a separate but related concept of the human body at work in narratology’s treatment of character. Theories of character depart from theories of fictional world because they are not organized around origins in any significant way. Indeed, we have seen almost no interest in the historical development of characters in the theories that I have cited,31 and no particular interest in the referential identity of the characters; instead, identity here comprises semantic or thematic meaning. I will try to show that theories of character and fictional world are similar, however, because both assume a modern European way of thinking about the body. Let us return again to Harvey’s very traditional discussion of literary characters, which suggests a great deal about the corporeality implicit in narratological theories of character. Harvey begins his discussion of literary character, somewhat surprisingly, with a comparison to objects. Specifically, he begins with R.H. Horne’s discussion of Dickens, which focuses on the importance of inanimate objects. Harvey describes this concern for objects as a quality of his imagination since this dense world of things is also alive; it has a comic or malign energy of its own. Dickens’s imagination is primitive, animistic. I think we misread him slightly if we take his quickening power as merely conceit or metaphor or symbol; I believe this inanimate world was, for him, literally alive. There is nothing very odd in this; when a pencil breaks or we stub our toe in the dark we often have, in a

sorted and general character bodies / 69 transient way, this primitive sense of objects stubbornly leading a mysterious life of their own, a life which sometimes thwarts or obtrudes into ours. (37)

By the end of this passage it becomes clear where Harvey is going; he will use the image of individuals confronting objects, things that are “other-than-us” (37), as the model for how characters “resist our attention, that they remain opaque, stubbornly themselves” (39).32 Harvey’s approach to human relationships feels quite dated, since his starting point is the concept of alienation and he approaches character through the context of the radical awareness of the gap between self and other. While these limitations are not irrelevant to our evaluation of Harvey’s theory, we should recognize that the way that he describes characters as “others” defines a tradition that critics will follow later despite other aspects of this theory. It is not an accident that characters are the elements of narrative most likely to elicit spatial language. Already I have quoted the metaphor of a “network” of characters in Chatman’s theory of character traits, which explicitly draws on the spatialized language of the paradigmatic axis from which individual characters are formed. Harvey uses the term “network” to describe fictional characters as well, but this spatial language of the character becomes most explicit in a more recent book on character by Baruch Hochman. Hochman speaks of character essentially as a structural device, a scheme that overarches the entire narrative: “The schematic organization of our knowledge of characters in literature differs from that of our knowledge of people in life in that the existence of characters in literature (and our perception of their existence) rests on the more or less coherent, more or less self-declaring structure of the work that generates them and that we perceive as a single thing. Even when we retrieve characters as relatively autonomous entities, we perceive them as part of an organizing structure made up of elements that are interfused with each other and that illuminate each other.”33 Hochman quite explicitly declares that character is an element of narrative that necessarily refers back to a spatializing structure that overarches the entire narrative. This spatialization of character is certainly clear in work like the actantal model of A.J. Greimas where characters are located within a four-part spatial structure in order to analyze their role within the events of the plot.34 This spatialization of character is perhaps most familiar in Fredric Jameson’s use of Greimas’s model. In The Political Unconscious, it will be recalled, Jameson uses Greimas to analyze novels like Conrad’s Lord Jim. Unlike Greimas’s original use of the semiotic


square to model agency, Jameson’s study is explicitly based on the contrast of character traits. He finds, for example, that the principle characters of Conrad’s Lord Jim can be arranged according to a series of semantic positions that they occupy in the novel’s overall spatial structure: between activity and non-activity, value and non-value. The penultimate diagram for Jameson’s analysis is as follows:35 “Lord” Jim ACTIVITY

VALUE

The Buccaneers (Gentleman Brown)

The Pilgrims

NOT-VALUE

NOT-ACTIVITY

The Deck-chair Sailors

Principle characters are taken to embody a combination of these logical possibilities. Jim, for example, represents activity and value in contrast to Gentleman Brown who represents activity but non-value. Although there is often resistance to the reductiveness of the type of structuralist analysis that Greimas and Jameson are doing, rarely is there resistance to the spatiality of the analysis itself. We accept the kind of analysis that Jameson develops, I think, in part because we recognize characters themselves as naturally spatially separated. Why are characters so consistently spatialized in critical literature even when the critics—like Jameson and Hochman—have radically different ideological approaches to narrative? At first we might be tempted to reply that spatialization, at least when it is used in the broad way that I have used it here, may be an inherent part of our ways of making sense of the world. This is certainly Greimas’s contention, since he sees the four-part structure as a way of breaking down any concept into a series of related ideas (opposites, contraries, contradictions) that give it a firm meaning and allow us to use it to analyze objects and situations.36 But if this is the case, surely all elements of narrative would be equally spatialized. And yet we will look long and hard before we find an instance of the spatialization of plot. Freytag’s famous but overused pyramid of rising and falling action immediately comes to mind, but this model has had little effect on the development of subsequent theories


of plot.37 Likewise, although types of narrators and voices are sometimes described spatially because of the metaphor of the narrator’s perspective being contained “within” that of the author,38 spatial renderings of the relations between voices or types of speech within a text are extremely rare.39 It seems to me an obvious but rarely observed fact that characters are spatialized in critical discourse because we are used to thinking about people as located within space. Narratology depends on an understanding of bodies largely alien to each other and to their environment—the sort of radical spatial separation of bodies that I described in the previous section in Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. Through this alienation they become distinct objects and enter into a thematic system of contrast. Past narratologies have largely ignored the way that characters are conceived as spatially differentiated. As this brief discussion should have already suggested, viewing characters as spatially discrete—we could say, even, spatially alienated—is the result of a very particular cultural and historical moment. A number of critics have associated this sorted, alienated body with modern culture. Even leaving aside Harvey’s own existentialist background, we can see the insistence on semantic contrasts as the basis upon which bodies become meaningful as part of the rise of modern scientific culture. Indeed, Foucault uses this process of structural sorting as the very definition of early modern culture. In The Order of Things, Foucault offers the contrast between Renaissance and early modern (or, “Classical”) ways of knowing botanical and zoological objects: To the Renaissance, the strangeness of animals was a spectacle: it was featured in fairs, in tournaments, in fictitious or real combats, in reconstitutions of legends in which the bestiary displayed its ageless fables. The natural history room and the garden, as created in the Classical period, replace the circular procession of the “show” with the arrangement of things in a “table.” What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse.40

Narratologists, however, rarely distinguish the texts to which such classifying methods are appropriate from those to which they are inappropriate. The nature of narratology is to seek out fundamental categories that can be applied to all literatures. While narratologists are considerably less willing than they once were to reduce narrative to some fundamental and abstract “deep structure” that causes all individual textual details to appear as inessential articulation, they retain the goal of defining generally applicable terms for the study of narrative texts. Narrative


bodies particularly reveal, however, the bias brought to this field by narratology’s traditional emphasis on the European novel. Alternatives to the Sorted Body We can say, then, that narratology’s treatment of character bodies as distinct objects to be sorted and integrated into a system of semantic contrasts reflects a particularly modern way of thinking about the body. This does not mean that this model might not apply well to modern narratives, but it does suggest that older literatures are likely to suffer when we insist on bringing this modern understanding of character to bear. Evelyn Birge Vitz notes, for example, that medieval characterization does not proceed so much by “individuation—horizontal differentiation among individuals—but with salvation and damnation, the rise and fall of souls, their vertical movement in relation to God.”41 As a result, Vitz argues, medieval narrative “was almost exclusively concerned with the placement of characters—especially but not only heroes—on the vertical axis: with what set them above or below—but not apart from—the common run of men” (16). Other types of narrative characters from earlier literatures even more remarkably violate modern models. We might recall again Scholes and Kellogg’s discussion of archetypal characters in the Nature of Narrative, which I also noted in chapter 1. They distinguish between two different types of characterization, the “typical” and the “archetypical.”42 Scholes and Kellogg describe a quality of character that is not simply a matter of the mimetic accumulation of significant traits. There seems to be, instead, an allegorical dimension to the character that departs from the kinds of semantic contrasts that Bal and other narratologists describe. There is a quality to a Quixote, Scholes and Kellogg imply, that seems to encompass the whole work rather than functioning by contrasts within it. This discussion of corporeal assumptions within modern narratology certainly suggests that critics need far more historical sensitivity to the assumptions about corporeality before they can discuss the comparative poetics of various periods and cultures. There is, however, a larger issue of narrative poetics independent of whatever historically specific body model that critics assume. In chapter 1, I noted that an inquiry into possible worlds leads us specifically to problems in the hermeneutics of narrative texts, and suggested that these problems are inherent in the way that we have come to think about the relations between the human body and the cosmos. There is a lesson in this discussion for our approach to narrative character as well. While one of the effects of revealing the alienated modern body as the base of


narratological theory is to suggest the need for more historically specific treatments of character, we should ask what gaps are themselves obvious in this narratology. In other words, it seems to me that even when applied exclusively to the modern narratives with which narratology’s understanding of corporeality coincides, the model of sorted character bodies fails to account for a number of aspects of our experience of narrative character. It is this failure that I would like to explore in the remainder of this chapter. Let us turn to a novel that initially seems to exemplify narratological ways of understanding the sorted body, but which also ultimately suggests the limits of this understanding. Toni Morrison’s Beloved uses both distinct bodies and also a more complex corporeality fitting uneasily within the modern, alienated body. We can see the traditional model of characters and bodies at work in the different attitudes of Sethe and Paul D toward the past. We recognize that the past has affected these two characters in different ways, and we sense that these two very different responses reveal the characters’ psychological traits (Sethe’s complexly defiant sense of guilt, Paul D’s desire to escape the past) and suggest something about the possible ways that one can think about the past. The novel reflects these thematic differences between the two characters in the types of bodies that each are assigned. Sethe’s body is literally marked by the past, her back inscribed with a “tree” of scars from a beating shortly before she escaped to the North. For this reason, Sethe’s relation to the past is dramatized externally—especially in her dealings with Beloved, the young woman who appears at Sethe’s house early in the novel and who turns out to embody this ghostly past. Conversely, occupying a body whose surface is largely unmarked, Paul D has memories of the past contained internally like a “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.”43 For this reason, his understanding of the past is dramatized through the negotiation of interior spaces, as he drives the ghost from Sethe’s house to make room for himself (39) or moves to the margins of the town when Beloved forces him from that house later in the novel. In all of this, Beloved seems to deploy contrasting character bodies for thematic purposes—just as traditional narratology would lead us to expect. More problematic is the novel’s principle character, Beloved, the young woman who appears at Sethe’s house early in the novel, and who turns out to embody this ghostly past. Although Beloved may seem to be simply another character, her appearance in the story is ontologically heterogeneous—she quite literally does not inhabit the same world as Sethe and Paul D. Beloved seems to exist as a projection of Sethe’s own


feelings about the past. This latter function certainly fits uneasily within theories of character based on meaningful contrasts, since we cannot easily place Beloved side-by-side with the other characters for interpretation. James Phelan has recently noted the problems of interpreting the character of Beloved. Drawing on the various readings that the novel has been given in the past, Phelan writes, Beloved is a survivor of the Middle passage and of a white man found dead in his cabin around the time she shows up at 124. She is both Sethe’s murdered daughter and her murdered African mother, a specific character in a specific family and a representative of all the middle passage women, “and also all Black women in America trying to trace their ancestry back to the mother on a ship attached to them.” She is a figure filled with the psychokinetic energy of others, who then use that energy to act out their needs and desires. She is the incarnation of Sethe’s guilt. Because the novel supports—indeed, insists on—all these not entirely compatible accounts, it prevents us from resting with any one and makes the struggle to “perform” her part of Morrison’s world extraordinarily demanding.44

Morrison develops this untraditional characterization precisely by complicating Beloved’s body. Although an eighteen-year-old girl when she appears at Sethe’s house, she appears in many ways infant-like. Sethe, likewise, seems to repeat the process of birthing just before Beloved appears; her water metaphorically “breaks” just as she first glimpses Beloved sitting on her porch, for example. Although she may be a ghost, Beloved is also physically linked to Sethe in a way that makes no conventional sense within the novel. It is certainly possible to explain Beloved’s appearance literally as the working of spirits, but it is also possible to see these textual features as the result of Morrison’s own narrative purposes. Beloved, like Beloved, is clearly a text to be read, a message from the past. After all, Beloved’s own name comes from the one word that Sethe is able to have carved onto the young child’s tombstone (5). Although, as Phelan suggests, Beloved can be treated as one of the characters in any number of thematic systems of contrasts, she also raises meta-interpretive issues. She literally comes to symbolize the difficulty of interpreting the work. She is not simply an enigma, but is rather a figure that represents the many ways in which we can give significance to Morrison’s whole novel. Morrison seems to be suggesting that the relationship between Sethe/reader and Beloved/text is a physical, corporeal one. Beloved’s body is an overarching narrative body, a body more general than that of any character, which serves as our ingress to the novel and its difficult subject matter.


In Beloved, Morrison creates a textual body that plays a different role within her narrative than the sorted bodies that we have described in the first part of this chapter. The general body that we see in this novel is a means to understanding the text as a whole, and implicitly suggests that our experience of a text is corporeally more complex than simply identifying characters and individuating them within a schematic structure. In this sense, Morrison’s novel is very much in keeping with a number of recent theories of corporeality, which have argued that the relationship between world and body has been simplified by our emphasis on sight as the model of perception. Particularly eloquent on this point is Elizabeth Grosz, who has mounted a wide-ranging critique of the modern understanding of the body. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Grosz describes the implications of sight: “The epistemological value of sight is based on the clarity and precision of the images of which it is composed. An image, traditionally, has three characteristics: it presents a manifold field or set of events in terms of simultaneity (it is the only nontemporal or synchronous sense); it functions at a distance, setting up a space or field between the seer and the seen, the physical and the psychical; and it does not imply or presume causality (because the other senses are momentary and occasioned by events, vision is ongoing and need not be focused on or caused by any object).”45 Grosz sees this pattern in thinking about the body going back to the beginnings of Greek philosophy, but locates Descartes as a key transition into modern thinking. The body/mind dualism, according to Grosz, is basis for our modern theories of knowledge: Scientific discourse aspires to impersonality, which it takes to be equivalent to objectivity. The correlation of our ideas with the world or the reality they represent is a secondary function, independent of the existence of consciousness, the primary, indubitable self-certainty of the soul. Reality can be attained by the subject only indirectly, by inference, deduction, or projection. Descartes, in short, succeeded in linking the mind/body opposition to the foundations of knowledge itself, a link which places the mind in a position of hierarchical superiority over and above nature, including the nature of the body. (6)

This observation about the modern body is especially important to a theory of narrative meaning because Grosz argues that this way of thinking makes the body amenable to being invested with meaning, since sight seems to provide “the raw elements, the data necessary for the production of knowledge” (97). We have already seen that when critics speak about the meaning of narrative characters, it is almost always by


imagining them spread out in space simultaneously and separated from each other. What is the alternative to the visual model of corporeality? Again following Merleau-Ponty, Grosz suggests that taking touch rather than sight as the basis for the body’s place in the world produces a very different way of thinking about the body: “Touch is regarded as a contact sense. . . . [I]t provides contiguous access to an abiding object; the surface of the toucher and the touched must partially coincide” (98). Among other things, Grosz’s interest in touch suggests those aspects of corporeality that are being incompletely represented by traditional philosophy. In particular, we have noted Grosz’s critique of the Cartesian separation of body and mind; the visual model implies that the mind treats the body at best as a place for the mind to occupy rather than as an inherent part of identity. Touch as a model for our interaction with the outside world, conversely, suggests that rather than thinking about bodies as spatially separated and distinct, we should consider the ways in which individual bodies engage in an ongoing exchange.46 Neither Grosz nor Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that the traditional, visual model for corporeal experience is entirely wrong—that we should literally or metaphorically close our eyes and experience the world entirely through touch. Rather, touch defines a more fundamental corporeal “atmosphere”—more fundamental because literally closer to the body— in which the visual experience of the world and other bodies must be contextualized. Grosz clearly has touch in mind when she describes the skin as “the ground for the articulation of orifices, erotogenic rims, cuts on the body’s surface, loci of exchange between the inside and the outside, points of conversion of the outside into the body, and of the inside out of the body” (36). For her, touch itself defines the context in which all other relations between the body and the world, and objects within the world, must be understood.47 Grosz’s call for a return to the larger corporeality of “touch” clearly has implications for the way that we think about bodies within narrative, but how we respond to this critique is not obvious. If narrative is a means of conveying knowledge about the world, there may well be something particularly appropriate about the visual model of the body. We need to ask, however, if there are elements of narrative texts that engage with corporeality in ways other than as distinct, meaningful bodies. To return to Morrison’s novel, we might note that in describing Beloved as a general body that overarches others, I am really suggesting that she is a mediating figure—both between the individual characters, and between the reader and text. She is not only a means of bringing


other characters into contact, but also a physical embodiment of a story that the reader must confront. The last image in the book is of the disappearing traces of Beloved’s body: “Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (275). Morrison ends the novel by emphasizing the reader’s position in relation to this subject matter in general and to Beloved herself in particular in the refrain of the book’s last chapter: “This is not a story to pass on” (275). Beloved here seems to exemplify a kind of corporeality that does not coalesce into a distinct body given meaning by the story, but instead brings character and character, reader and text into contact. She is literally the means by which these narrative elements “touch.” In arguing that Beloved represents a type of character body outside of narratology, I am suggesting not only that narratology has adopted a historically limited frame of reference for its theories, but also that it seems unable to account for important elements of the text even in the modern narrative to which it should apply especially well. In particular, narratology has failed to theorize moments when character corporeality will exceed individual bodies and provide a general hermeneutic atmosphere for the reader’s contact with the narrative. This, I think, is the equivalent in narrative terms of Grosz’s theory of the importance of touch in our everyday experience of the world. In contrast to visual models that seek to separate characters into distinct objects that we analyze from a distance, this atmosphere quite literally implies that we interact with the text in a more complex way. Touch represents a concern for our ongoing interaction with the world and the inseparability of body and identity.48 Likewise, in narrative I am suggesting that we attend to the ongoing contact between reader and character. There are certain character bodies that represent points of contact between the reader and the text. This point of contact provides the hermeneutic atmosphere of the text. We can describe Beloved as a kind of general character body—one that stands above the individual bodies of the story and mediates between them. In describing her this way, I am suggesting a link between Morrison’s novel and a long tradition of using the human body to figure social relations, especially within political discourse. Ernst Kantorowicz’s discussion of European medieval political philosophy, The King’s Two Bodies, is one of the best-known explanations of the use of a general body to speak about social relations. Kantorowicz defines the tradition of thinking about a monarch as embodying the whole of a nation. A king


might be understood to have the “two bodies” of Kantorowicz’s title in the sense that the frailties and mortality of his “body natural” must be distinguished categorically from his “body politic,” which is timeless, perfect, and ultimately owned by no one—not even the king himself.49 The idea that the king embodies the whole society leads quite naturally to the best-known use of the “body politic”—as a way to speak about the unity of the whole society. One of the classic examples of the body used to symbolize the society is provided by Thomas Hobbes at the outset of Leviathan: For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, in Latin CIVITAS, which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates, and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment, by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty every joint and member is moved to perform his duty, are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural. . . .50

Hobbes here uses the parts of the body (soul, joints, nerves) to discuss the relationship between different individuals within the whole society (king, magistrate, officers). Behind Kantorowicz’s study is the recognition that societies necessarily construct general bodies to which all its individuals are taken to belong as part of the way that they think about social totalities. The body politic, then, is a concept that provides an image of the whole society, and that helps for thinking about the meaning of citizens’ social role. In other words, it helps to shape social hermeneutics. Other general bodies have appeared at different historical moments. Today we are probably more likely to think about society in terms of the “normal” body—as a kind of exemplum through which we can think about difference and social order. A particularly good example of the construction of such normal bodies is Cesare Lombroso’s now infamous anthropometric studies that attempted to define the physiological markings of criminality. David Horn has recently observed that Lombroso’s interest in statistical methods of studying society in fact arose from an increased awareness of the individuality of its members. Horn writes, “The construction of crime as a social fact and problem, and of criminology as a social science, was ironically linked to a new focus on the individuality of the offender and to new scientific practices of individuation.”51 Although today recognized as unscientific and patently racist, Lombroso’s methods can be


seen as an attempt to recreate the image of a social whole previously provided by the body politic in the light of the individuality of many members of that society—especially the seemingly inevitable tendency within a society toward unlawful acts that hurt the body politic. Like so many nineteenth-century social thinkers, Lombroso seems to be asking why the body politic seems inevitably to have elements that work against its well-being. We can say in this sense that the challenges posed by individual actions that rebel against the social body were ultimately worked back into another form of “body politic” and subordinated to a theory that placed all members of the society along an evolutionary line. Horn explains: Anthropometry promised both to make potential dangers known and manageable and to specify the social, historical, and evolutionary place of the criminal body. Lombroso argued that the criminal was linked by his abnormal anatomy and physiology to the insane person and the epileptic, as well as to those other “others” who were constituted as the objects of the social sciences: the ape, the child, woman, prehistoric man, and the contemporary savage. For Lombroso, the criminal was, in his body and conduct, and “atavism”—a reemergence of the historical and evolutionary pasts in the present. (112)

Here, bodies are organized within a single continuum of the primitive to the civilized. A criminal merely displays tendencies that are already implicit within this trans-individual body. It is not difficult to see the body that arises from Lombroso’s anthropometry as a return to the generalized body of the whole society in the body politic. Although this generalized body is quite different from the symbolic relations with which Kantorowicz associated the body politic, it nonetheless describes an image that makes the whole society meaningful. It creates a hermeneutic context through which individuals and historical events can be interpreted. In the context of such reflections on the generalized body in narrative and social thinking, we can see the modern image of sorted bodies mutually exterior to each other as one particular general body. At the outset of this chapter I quoted Harvey’s association of characters and objects, where individuals are caught within a “web of human relationships” that “show us what we ourselves are not.” Modern literary characters are, then, radically “other” to one another in a way that positions them firmly outside of each other. We have seen critics like Chatman and, more reluctantly, Bal offer this exteriority as a model for characters in general. The idea that characters form a semantic “network” through which a narrative presents and evaluates certain personal or metaphysical “traits” assumes precisely


this image of the character bodies as positioned externally within a preexisting literary space. Instead of either accepting this model as universal or rejecting it as historically biased toward modern literature, we should consider it as an example of how any hermeneutics must work to create a general human body. When Harvey defines characters as positioned within an alien space, he is elevating to the level of a general schematic for understanding the variety of body types within narrative one particular body type. Certainly there will be variations among the way that this general body type will be represented, variations that will account for why all of the characters in modern literature do not occupy exactly the same body. Nonetheless, we can say that this image of the alienated body is precisely the general body that becomes the basis upon which these other variations are thought. General Bodies and Narrative Hermeneutics In suggesting that narratology should attend more closely to the corporeal atmosphere of a narrative as defining the fundamental hermeneutic conditions of the reader’s interaction with the text, I may seem to be moving beyond the scope of theories of narrative character. And, indeed, this is certainly a possibility, since this type of more elusive textual corporeality has, in fact, been discussed in primarily non-narratological contexts. Hélèn Cixous’s writings on écriture féminine suggest the reader’s physical engagement with the literary text hinted at in Beloved. When Cixous describes a woman struggling to speak at a public gathering, she clearly has in mind a kind of writing experienced through the body: “She doesn’t ‘speak,’ she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech. Her flesh speaks true.”52 Here is a corporeal element of a story that is not a discrete object represented in the speech text, but rather a whole bodily “atmosphere” out of which the work is produced and through which it must be experienced. Such a general, overarching corporeal atmosphere establishing a fundamental contact between reader, writer, and text before any defined bodies appear within the work, seems to be a fair approximation in narrative theory of Grosz’s concept of touch as prior to sight. Clearly, however, Cixous’s observations about textual corporeality are far from the kind of analysis of specific textual features that we expect from narratology, and mark a distinct movement beyond theories of character in particular. Indeed, in investigating this corporeal atmosphere, we run the risk of sliding away from engagement in concerns


specific to narrative and toward very metaphorical claims about the act of reading in general. In chapter 1, I suggested this same danger when I noted that narratives’ creation of possible worlds engaged in concepts of mimesis and projected problems of hermeneutics in general. It should be no surprise that these same hermeneutic issues appear in character theory, since we have seen that they ultimately attempt to describe the very way in which a text becomes meaningful. Although bodies will be a part of the interpretation of any representation of humans, and although hermeneutics describes interpretation in general, I think that there is a specific way in which the body will work to provide a hermeneutic atmosphere in narrative. We have already seen that Beloved creates its hermeneutic atmosphere through the figure of a particular character body. Although the type of corporeality that Cixous describes will be a part of any text, we can say, the choice to dramatize this relation specifically through a character body is inherent to narrative. Grosz’s point that bodies touch applies especially well to narrative, where we can say that what makes character description into narrative is the interaction of those characters—the fact that characters literally or figuratively “touch” in the course of the story’s events. Narrative characters become meaningful when they touch and interact. It is, of course, one of the defining qualities of narrative that descriptions of place and character are animated by events. Indeed, one of the standard definitions of narrative is change of state whose cause is explored. As E.M. Forster remarked, “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”53 Critics have debated this definition of narrative at length and offered alternatives. Certainly the rhetorical manipulation of time sequence has emerged as a major element of narrative, for example. But critics generally accept the idea that narrative describes the meaningful presentation of temporal change. Didier Coste has more recently offered the following summary: “An act of communication is narrative whenever and only when imparting a transitive view of the world is the effect of the message produced.”54 Hayden White has distinguished between a more rudimentary chronicle and narrative’s ability to explain events and describe their importance.55 This emphasis on meaningful events assumes that the agents of those events—the narrative’s characters—will interact in some way. A text that describes separate characters without observing their interaction is far more likely to be classified as a prose


poem of some sort than a narrative. Likewise, a text that emphasizes directly the corporeal relationship between the reader and text without connecting this relationship to the interaction between character bodies will lack narrativity. Narrative characters, in other words, touch. And when they touch, they are developing a whole corporeal atmosphere for the text. We can say, then, that narratives dramatize the corporeality implicit within all interaction between text and reader in the bodies of characters. Character corporeality in this sense will always function as a way of commenting on how the text may be read. Some time ago Ross Chambers argued that narratologists have not thought enough about the “situation” of a narrative—“the social fact that narrative mediates human relationships and derives its ‘meaning’ from them.”56 For Chambers, narrative in general is interested in its impact and the way that it will be read, and frequently works to define its own interpretational context: My critique of the narratological tradition conveniently encapsulated by Seymour Chatman is not, then, that this tradition fails to explore the pragmatics of literary narrative in the sense of the empirical circumstances in which literary texts come to be written and read. It is rather that, in concerning itself with literary texts, it has neglected those features in them—those textual indices of contractual and transactional understandings— that themselves realize the narratives as communicational acts and open them, as verbal structures, onto a world of events and change. Not the actual historicity of texts, but the markers, within them, of historical situation— these are what a renewed narratology, concerned with the phenomenon of point, might take as its object. (10)

Chambers does not explore narrative’s concern for the “phenomenon of point” through character bodies, but instead through mise en abyme remarks—usually made within self-conscious early modernist texts— about how they should be read. But my discussion of general bodies and the corporeal atmosphere of interpretation suggests that Chambers’s theory might be approached through the human body. If character bodies are the basic building blocks of narrative events, and if those bodies in turn help to define the reader’s position in relation to the text, then narrative is always necessarily concerned with its own hermeneutic conditions. As I have tried to show here, to understand the semantics of narrative’s characters is to recognize and to adopt the general body that mediates all of these characters. It is not enough merely to observe that some


characters are embodied and others disembodied, or that some are sorted according to their presence in the world or absence from it. We needed to know as well how these individual bodies fit within a larger hermeneutics. This overarching understanding of corporeality is essential to making bodies meaningful, and defines a general body through which all of the textual objects “touch.” This general body may be figured in many different ways—from the alienated space of Woolf ’s novel, to the ironic links between Norris’s characters, to the literally embodied figure of reading in Beloved. However a narrative represents this general body, it will always be our readerly ingress to the story.


CHAPTER 3 Plot and the Unruly Body

In chapters 1 and 2 we have seen that corporeality has a fundamental effect upon the way that we visualize and theorize the concepts of narrative world and character. We have seen not only that narratology is shaped by the particularly modern body that it imagines as the basis of storytelling, but that the body is a site where a host of hermeneutic problems arise. At the end of chapter 2, I suggested that these general hermeneutic problems had particularly narrative solutions in the way that character bodies were used to stage the interaction between different types of corporeality, and that in the process a “general” body overarched the story. This interaction occurs, I suggested, through the basic temporality of the narrative—its description of time and change. I would like to turn to the body’s place within our way of representing time in this chapter. Most people assume that our experience is shapeless and disparate until we give it form. One of the most common ways of speaking about this act of giving order to experience is as “narrating” events. Indeed, one of the reasons that narrative has had durability and continued popularity as a critical concept is because it seems to describe a concrete and ubiquitous act of meaning-making in everyday life. When people speak about narrative in this way, what they most have in mind is the ability of narrative to create plots, to organize events into a meaningful temporal and causal sequence. Although we might say that in telling such stories we create characters and settings, adopt the role of a narrator, perhaps even posit possible worlds—all those textual acts that we associate with narratology—the key to narrative’s ability to transcend literary study is how it organizes time. Narrative seems to take the disparate events of life— everything from everyday experience to broadly significant historical events—and construct a meaningful pattern. In examining the body in plot, we discover the crucial role played by what Paul Ricoeur calls narrative distention. Plot works to create gaps


between an overarching and an unruly body. Recognizing how plot does this will ultimately help us to understand the interplay between specific and general narrative bodies that I postulated at the end of chapter 2, and help to theorize the complex hermeneutics that narrative corporeality has revealed. Narrating as Giving Order A good deal of the credit for the expansion of narrative emplotment into a wide variety of fields and areas of experience falls to Hayden White. White’s argument that narrative is crucial to historiography has been important in shaping our current belief that narrative is inherent to any attempt to make sense of time and event. Probably the best known of White’s work is his essay on the conditions under which narrative is possible in the telling of history, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”—a title that clearly suggests the broad application that narrative has been given in the last twenty years. White, it will be recalled, begins by describing what he takes to be the pre-narrational understanding of history evidenced in the medieval annals. These annals, White notes, describe events that are “extreme, and the implicit criterion for selecting them for remembrance is their liminal nature.”1 Although White is anxious to avoid suggesting that this sort of writing is without a method of sorting events, he finds in the annals a very simple system of sorting recordable from unrecordable events that seems to exclude a wide range of phenomena, and that makes no distinctions between significant and insignificant events. In observing this list, White suggests that these events cannot be sorted by significance precisely because the writer inhabits a society in which what would constitute such significance is unclear. White concludes that these annals evidence an “image of reality according to which the social system, which alone could provide the diacritical markers for ranking the importance of events, is only minimally present” (10). Precisely what distinguishes narratives from these simple lists of liminal events is that the former has a more sophisticated method of identifying events and some principle—some method of emplotting—that allows them to be organized. Particularly evident in White’s discussion of narrative within historiography is the way that non-narrative experience of events lack coherence. A number of times White claims that he wants to view annals writing not simply as pre-narrative: “surely a genuinely historical interest would require that we ask not how or why the annalist failed to write a ‘narrative’ ” (6). But when he turns to consider the role of narrative

plot and the unruly body / 87

within history writing, his discussion depends on the annals’ much looser organization of discontinuous pre-narrative facts. White’s explanation of what gives narratives their ability to sort and shape events is well-known. According to White, a “social center” provides a means of organizing narrative events: What is lacking in the list of events to give it a similar regularity and fullness is a notion of a social center by which to locate them with respect to one another and to charge them with ethical or moral significance. It is the absence of any consciousness of a social center that prohibits the annalist from ranking the events he treats as elements of a historical field of occurrence. And it is the absence of such a center that precludes or undercuts any impulse he might have had to work up his discourse into the form of a narrative. (11)

The negative language in this description is quite evident. Annals’ writing is not simply an alternative to narrative, but rather a form of recording that lacks an essential organizing principle that emerges in narrative. In many ways, this way of understanding narrative as the fulfillment of discontinuous real events could be seen as inevitable. If events come to us as naturally discontinuous, as naturally lacking cohesion without some form of ordering applied after the fact, then experience before narrative will inevitably be seen as a kind of lack, a period of disorganization only resolved with the introduction of a narrative. Precisely this way of thinking about temporal experience is evident in writing that treats narrative as a more or less universal element of the human attempt to understand time. If temporal experience begins naturally in discontinuity and incoherence, then narrative will likewise be a natural response to that confusion. Temporal experience without narrative appears, then, within current philosophical, historical, and cultural thinking as naturally discontinuous—as naturally non-narrative. What creates this discontinuity? We might recall White’s comment that all of the events within the annals are liminal. Indeed, bodily needs seem to represent the alternative to narrative: “Basic need—food, security from external enemies, political and military leadership—and the threat of their not being provided are the subjects of concern” (7). It is not clear in White’s essay that these bodily needs themselves create the discontinuity of the pre-narrative annals, but they certainly keep the society from developing the social center necessary for narrative and exemplify the kinds of momentary concerns that mark the pre-narrative. Indeed, in broader philosophical treatments of the narrative organization of human experience, the body naturally


appears as the “other” to narrative. In his discussion of narrative in everyday life experience, Anthony Paul Kerby describes the body as the physical basis of human continuity and thus everything that narrative transcends: If, as we have seen, time is fundamentally the time of my life (between birth and death), personal identity will depend upon the continuity of meaningful experience in this life. The physical body may well be the permanent locus of my insertion in the world, and it is indeed a fairly solid basis for continuity, but it is the events that unfold from this locus that generate the meaning of my existence, both through the habitualities it embodies and the history it exhibits.2

In both Kerby’s and White’s accounts, the body represents whatever is outside of the narrative ordering of experience. In both cases, to be sure, the body remains a necessary outside—the “permanent locus” from which narrative springs, according to Kerby. But simple bodily continuity, the existence of the body in time or the continuous effort of the body to survive despite harsh physical conditions, clearly represents for both writers the opposite of a genuinely narrative understanding of temporal experience. When we consider more strongly articulated theories of narrative emplotment, a duality of the body’s relation to narrative becomes evident. Peter Brooks’s Freudian theory of narrative developed in Reading for the Plot (1984) exemplifies our common ways of thinking about plot in a particularly explicit way. In emphasizing desire as the crucial element of plot, Brooks hopes to revise traditional structuralist models of plot with a greater interest in the “dynamic” of the “motor force in human desire, its peculiar relation to beginnings and ends, its apparent claim to rescue meaning from temporal flux.”3 Desire here specifically suggests a tension between the plot as a process and the plot as an overarching structure that stands outside of time and is visible only retrospectively. For this reason, narrative desire seems to Brooks to be profoundly ambivalent about its own temporality: “The sense of a beginning . . . must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments— in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot” (94). To explain this apparently contradictory temporality, Brooks turns to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and its central interest in why individuals repeat traumatic events. Repetition functions


for Freud, Brooks observes, both as a form of mastery (becoming active in a situation where one initially seems to be passive) and as an attempt to return to an earlier state of being—ultimately, to the inorganic state of death. Brooks brings these two impulses together in the following passage: What operates in the text through repetition is the death instinct, the drive toward the end. Beyond and under the domination of the pleasure principle is this baseline of plot, its basic “pulsation,” sensible or audible through the repetitions that take us back in the text. Yet repetition also retards the pleasure principle’s search for the gratification of discharge, which is another forward-moving drive of the text. We have a curious situation in which two principles of forward movement operate upon one another to create retard, a dilatory space in which pleasure can come from postponement in the knowledge that this . . . is a necessary approach to the true end. (102–03)

Plot here is a necessary delay created precisely out of the desire that would seem to drive the story toward its conclusion. Delay arises from the paradoxical dynamics implicit in a desire for an ending. Although Brooks’s theory is peculiar in focusing on the death instinct and in working so insistently within the paradoxes created by that concept, it is absolutely typical of narrative theory in general by approaching the subject of plot as a tension between end and delay. We saw White answer this tension by suggesting that life is inherently discontinuous, and that plot was the attempt to give shape to an inherently confused temporality. For Brooks, the source of this temporal discontinuity is not the inherently chaotic nature of everyday life, but rather the way that desire itself retards the eventual appearance of overarching plot. But in departing from White’s assumption that events themselves are discontinuous, Brooks ultimately confirms a deeper and more important principle in our ways of thinking about narrative plot. What Brooks’s and White’s ways of accounting for the discontinuous “other” of narrative order share is a tie to the body. I have already suggested that White sees discontinuity as best summarized by simple human, bodily need. The body exerts demands that work against the kinds of cultural and intellectual construction inherent to narrative. For Brooks, likewise, it is an inherent bodily desire to return to a prior state that ultimately ends up retarding the progress toward the end point of narrative. Brooks goes a step beyond White by suggesting that the body accounts for both parts of the act of emplotting: both the overarching meaning given the plot (the drive toward death) and the force that acts


to delay that ending (narrative repetition). Paradoxically, bodily desire describes both the plot and what resists that plot. Although Brooks’s Freudian theory of desire as producing and retarding plot seems to be a departure from traditional ways of thinking about plot, the paradoxical way that it imagines the body in narrative temporality is in fact implicit within much of our most traditional and bestknown work on narrative. One such study is Northrop Frye’s influential theory of seasonal mythoi in Anatomy of Criticism, where we can also observe the bodily paradoxes that Brooks describes at work in narrative time. Frye, of course, imagines plots on the model of yearly seasons: comedy as Spring, tragedy as Autumn, romance as Summer, and satire as Winter. Frye’s theory is quite explicitly a cyclical one, attempting to describe the circular movement between states: “The fundamental form of process is cyclical movement, the alternation of success and decline, effort and repose, life and death which is the rhythm of process.”4 Frye’s theory influenced a whole generation of critics not only because of the wide variety of works that it illuminated, but also because it suggested what we might describe as an underlying logic beneath a great deal of literary writing. Frye manages to integrate the major forms of traditional plot under a broad banner that accounts for the similarities between tragedy and comedy, while balancing social and individual elements of the unity that is created. We might say that Frye’s most important suggestion is that both individual and community can be understood within this model of birth/death/rebirth—indeed, that the individual is a representative and instrument of the community within this model. Frye makes this point as he begins to develop his theory of myths: “myth is the same world looked at as an area or field of activity, bearing in mind our principle that the meaning or pattern of poetry is a structure of imagery with conceptual implications. The world of mythical imagery is usually represented by the conception of heaven or Paradise in religion, and it is apocalyptic . . . a world of total metaphor, in which everything is potentially identical with everything else, as though it were all inside a single infinite body” (136). These mythic modes are eventually significant because they manage to show the individual’s place within the whole social framework, and to use the individual life as a model for that society. In a fairly straightforward way, Frye turns to traditional symbols of a trans-individual body to represent social health. In chapter 2 we have already noted how important such general bodies are to theories of character; Frye makes clear that the human body can be used to speak about the trajectory of a community’s development. This theory confirms the same impulse that we noted in Brooks’s Freudian theory—the attempt


to account for plot by associating the human body both with the unifying principle of plot, and with that which creates the confusion that plot itself must eventually resolve. Frye’s list of the sorts of typical plot problems in comedy make clear their bodily basis: We have noted that the cognitio of comedy is much concerned with straightening out the details of the new society, with distinguishing brides from sisters and parents from foster-parents. The fact that the son and the father are so often in conflict means that they are frequently rivals for the same girl, and the psychological alliance of the hero’s bride and the mother is often expressed or implied. The occasional “naughtiness” of comedy, as in the Restoration period, has much to do, not only with marital infidelity, but with a kind of comic Oedipus situation in which the hero replaces his father as a lover. (180–81)

Here natural social order is interrupted by the demands of desire and the confusion of bodies—male for female, father for son, and so on. Individual aspirations both seem to force human society away from its natural balance and at the same time function as an engine of the plot’s movement—the energy that drives the story from one stage to the next. Constructing the Resisting Body Frye’s model, then, somewhat surprisingly confirms the dual role of the human body that we observed within Brooks’s theory. We can say that plot stages the same interaction between general and individual bodies that we observed at the end of chapter 2 in character theory. In this sense, the fundamental temporal dimension of the text is imagined through this corporeality. Of the two, the body’s ability to represent and shape the overarching plot pattern that is evident in Frye is certainly the more obvious, although the other pole of the emplotment of time is associated with the human body for reasons that likewise seem straightforward. If, according to White, everyday experience naturally comes to us as disunified and in need of mental if not strictly discursive representation, then the body will be the best instance of that unordered brute experience. The examples of Brooks and Frye suggests, however, that more might be going on than first meets the eye. After all, both of these critics articulate the eventual shape of overarching plot precisely by linking the overall symbolic body and its natural dynamics to the individual body that resists emplotment and that thus gives rise to the need for emplotting in the first place. In these two theories, plots do not just work on the raw matter of brute human experience. Rather, the eventual shape of


overarching plot is already prefigured in the individual body that resists plot and that consequently makes it possible. The body that resists plot is, then, not only the precondition of that plot, but also in a curious way a mirror of the total shape that eventually arises out of time—literally a representation of the whole in reverse. This relationship between the resisting element and the overall shape leads me to question the way in which this seemingly prior condition is constructed. What I have in mind is an observation that Judith Butler makes about the ways in which materiality, conceived as the brute stuff that is outside of culture and meaning, in fact arises from within language and discourse, and is every bit as constructed as the social patterns that we seek to distinguish it from. Butler’s theory, in which “materiality [is] rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect”5 is both well-known and influential. Her discussion of Lacan’s “mirror stage” seems to me especially comparable to the reading of the plot-resisting body that I am suggesting here. Within Lacanian theory, the mirror stage describes a moment when an infant realizes the shape and wholeness of his or her body by seeing an image—either the child’s reflected image from a mirror, or another person with whom the child momentary identifies. Lacan is fairly explicit in describing the infant’s prior stage as a lack of bodily control and fragmentation, which is transformed imaginatively in the mirror image: This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.6

Lacan’s theory of the child’s transformation in the mirror stage has resonated for critics both because of its theoretical significance for speaking about subjectivity and for its ability to help readers understand particular moments within literature that offer images of bodily wholeness. No doubt another reason that the mirror stage has been for critics the most accessible and widely used aspect of Lacanian theory is because it tells a familiar story of the transition for incoherence to coherence. We have seen precisely the same story told by White in his explanation of emplotment as the transformation of incoherent natural and human


events into a plot organized around a social center and a shared sense of community significance. Like White, Lacan insists on the temporal quality of this transformation—it is a way of defining the difference between “then” and “now,” between the middle of the events and the shape that they are eventually given. To his credit, Lacan seems to recognize that this moment may well be a construction as much as an actual, observable moment, since this transformation is “experienced” as temporal and works to “project” an individual into history. Lacan, in other words, seems to recognize that the story being told uses this transitional moment to organize its narrative time. As much as Butler finds Lacan’s theory powerful for describing the formation of subjectivity out of identification, she is suspicious of the way that the time before the mirror stage is imagined. She asks, “Why should the body be given in parts before it is specularized as a totality and center of control? How did this body come to be in pieces and parts? To have a sense of a piece or a part is to have in advance a sense for the whole to which they belong” (81–82). Butler’s point is difficult to argue with—it is only in retrospect that we can understand the premirror stage as fragmented because fragmentation implies a whole from which the part is broken. That fragmentation is constructed after the fact precisely as the opposite of the coherence that is found in the mirror stage and, later, in the subject’s articulation into language. Butler is interested in this moment of imagined priority because she is concerned with the way that bodily materiality is constructed for particular social and discursive reasons as precisely that which is outside of society and discourse. For her, Lacan’s construction of the pre-mirror stage is of a piece with all attempts to use materiality to make some claim to special priority, to a bruteness that exists before society and that consequently makes possible certain appeals to theoretical priority. It seems to me that exactly the same sort of story is being told by critics like White when they describe narrative as arising from a prior moment of brute material experience. This prior moment, we can say, is a reconstruction made possible and necessary by the way that the eventual overarching plot is imagined. As we have seen in Frye’s and Brooks’s theories, plot is frequently imagined on bodily models as a kind of wholeness or dialectic of physical development. As in Lacan’s mirror stage, the time before meaning is imagined in the obverse of that eventual shape, but in the same terms—in both cases, through the body. The importance of the body to both Lacanian and narrative theory should not be surprising, since both are interested in the appearance of meaning, the dialectical shaping of experience into structure conceived in discursive and social


terms. Precisely that attempt to imagine the time before such meaning leads both theories to the body as the exemplum of such brute, unorganized experience. If my application of Butler’s critique of a prior materiality to theoretical stories about how narratives organize experience is correct, it suggests that the ability to narrate will depend on the ability to imagine a body that resists narrative closure. In other words, before we can have stories that move through a narrative trajectory within some overarching pattern, we must be able to think about bodies in a way that allows them to resist that pattern. According to this theory, the historical emergence of plot as a structural narrative device will depend on the development of the understanding of the body as narratively unruly. We come, then, to the somewhat surprising conclusion that our modern ideas about plot will appear only when we have an overarching image of the body and, especially, a way of thinking about bodies that resist this whole image. Certainly White’s approach to narrative in historiography is likely to make us miss this element, since it follows common sense in treating narrative as a struggle to conquer everyday, natural incoherence. I think that we can see the importance of this narrative formulation of incoherence if we turn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel. In particular, Bakhtin’s discussion about the rise of the “chronotope” natural to the modern novel suggests precisely this struggle to define what is unruly within plot. According to Bakhtin, the chronotope describes the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.”7 In practical terms, the chronotope describes the way that narrative is staged in space and time. Indeed, Bakhtin suggestively describes the chronotope as a way of “giving flesh” to narrative: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84). In suggesting that the raw story outline of a narrative “takes on flesh,” Bakhtin rightly implies that the way that a narrative will imagine space and time is inherently linked to the way that it positions bodies within that space. The concept of the chronotope implicitly argues that all events must take place somewhere and through some notion of time, and in describing such a setting as a process of giving the narrative flesh, Bakhtin reminds us how important these spatio-temporal positions are to the body. In a very straightforward sense, bodies demand that space and time be made meaningful, since in that time/space, that chronotope, characters will choose, act, and anticipate consequences.


Bakhtin begins his discussion of the chronotope with the early Greek adventure novel. Bakhtin observes that ancient Greek novels are composed of similar events organized around parted lovers struggling to be reunited despite a series of seemingly accidental misfortunes that keep them apart. For him, the time assumed by these novels is remarkable for the fact that little seems to change. The starting point of the novel is a sudden flareup of their love for each other; the ending of the novel is their inevitable (if much delayed) union. In between, Bakhtin says, time passes, but it is a meaningless time: “in essence nothing need lie between them [the staring and ending points of the narrative]. From the very beginning, the love between the hero and heroine is not subject to doubt; this love remains absolutely unchanged throughout the entire novel” (89). Unlike a modern novel, which might function by testing and consequently deepening this love, this novel treats the events that occur merely as unfortunate but inconsequential to the love and thus to the characters’ lives. As a result, Bakhtin argues, the narrative has no “biological and maturational” duration—that is, the time of the novel does not describe the passing of the characters’ lives or their psychological growth. It also lacks any cyclic or everyday quality, “such as might have introduced into it a temporal order and indices on a human scale, tying it to the repetitive aspects of natural and human life” (91). People do not age in these narratives, nor is the time in which the events take place marked by the novel. Instead, Bakhtin concludes, we have “an extratemporal hiatus that appears between two moments of a real time sequence” (91). Bakhtin characterizes this extratemporal hiatus as “adventure time,” and suggests that it constitutes the primary chronotope of this novel. Adventure time is characterized by the discreteness of its occurrences. New events are frequently introduced by transitions like “suddenly” because these novels do not describe any overarching time that connects all the events within the novel together. Space, likewise, is unmarked; these adventures occur in an exotic “nowhere,” since they have no connection to the later lives of the characters or to historical reality. Within this chronotope space is merely the ground for such contingent events: the “logic” of this type of novel “is one of random contingency, which is to say, chance simultaneity and chance rupture, that is, a logic of random disjunctions in time as well” (92). Space here, then, is historically unmarked and given specific meaning within the narrative only to the extent that it allows for certain types of encounters based solely upon chance: did the two individuals happen to be in this place at the same time? If we return to the language that I have used above, we could say that these works have not managed to think about how individual bodies resist narrative inevitability, resist the


overarching plot to which they will eventually succumb. The accidental qualities of the characters’ encounters that delay their marriage appear to be in no way related to the ultimate inevitability of their union. When Bakhtin turns to the development of genuinely biographical time in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass we can see much more clearly the relation between plot and resistance that is lacking in this earlier adventure novel. This novel is marked by the mixture of the adventure time that characterized earlier narratives and the “everyday time” that will be characteristic of the evolution of the chronotope in later novels. Bakhtin makes Apuleius’s departure from the adventure novel explicit at the outset of his discussion: “The plot of The Golden Ass is in no sense an extratemporal hiatus between two adjacent moments of real-life sequence. On the contrary, it is precisely the course of the hero’s (Lucius’) life in its critical moments that makes up the plot of the novel” (111). Much of the novel seems similar to the random events of the earlier adventure novel, since Lucius in the form of an ass moves from one encounter to another with very little control over his fate or actions. What makes this novel a departure from that tradition, however, is that the time during which Lucius is transformed into an ass is not merely a hiatus from his everyday life, but rather a period during which he becomes worthy of his transformation back into a human. Bakhtin explains that Apuleius uses the metamorphosis of Lucius to signal a broader transformation of his character: “Metamorphosis serves as the basis for a method of portraying the whole of an individual’s life in its more important moments of crisis: for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was. We are offered various sharply differing images of one and the same individual, images that are united in him as various epochs and stages in the course of a life” (115). In this transformation, Bakhtin finds the rudiments of what we would normally call a plot—the temporal development of a character through stages toward eventual final identity that provides closure for the story. Bakhtin notes that plot based on metamorphosis is not strictly a personal evolution in the same sense that we would expect in a modern novel: “There is no evolution in the strict sense of the word; what we get, rather, is crisis and rebirth” (115). Nonetheless, this crisis-based plot achieves a temporal movement toward a final stage that the adventure novel lacks. What is interesting for my discussion is the way that this kind of plot emerges precisely through the development of a narrative body that resists that plot. In an exemplary way, The Golden Ass suggests that the ability to imagine personal transformation and an overarching biographical plot depends on creating a narrative device that retards that development and


pushes the character through a detour that delays narrative closure. And this retarding device is Lucius’s body. Indeed, the central story of The Golden Ass, the time when Lucius has been transformed and is futilely seeking the rose petals that will transform him back into a human, describes a character who is quite literally locked into a body that organizes and delays narrative resolution. On every occasion when Lucius thinks that he will be able to eat the rose petals that will change him back, his inarticulate corporeality keeps him from being able to accomplish his goal. His first chance to eat the roses in the stable shortly after his transformation is met with a furious bodily assault: “But by a piece of really bad luck, before I could eat any of the roses, my slave who was acting as groom happened to catch me at work. He sprang up angrily from the heap of straw on which he was lying and shouted: ‘I’ve had quite enough trouble from this damned cuddy. First he tries to rob his stablemates and now he plays the same trick on the blessed gods! If I don’t flog the sacrilegious brute until he’s too lame to stir a hoof. . . .’”8 It is precisely because Lucius is trapped in this literally resisting body that the narrative is delayed. And, of course, because of this delay Lucius is able to come to the understanding that allows him to achieve the spiritual purification that characterizes him at the end of the novel. Lucius ends by undergoing a ceremony of “voluntary death” and rebirth: “So she [the goddess Isis] usually chooses old men who feel that their end is fast approaching yet are not too senile to be capable of keeping a secret; by her grace they are, in a sense, born again and restored to new and healthy life” (277). We could say that the spiritual rebirth exemplified in the end of The Golden Ass is made possible by Lucius’s experience of the decidedly unspiritual corporeality of the ass’s body. Although I have emphasized what Bakhtin has to say about the body as creating narrative delay and resisting closure, Bakhtin also argues that the body produces an overall, whole image of narrative development and social organization. In many ways, the core of Bakhtin’s theory—the assumption that drives all of his other observations and that gives this theory its particular force—is the claim that this increasing ability to present the continuity of an individual human life (and, in his Rabelais book, the continuity of multigenerational human life in general) brings increased concreteness to the places and characters of the narrative. Once authors begin to construct narratives in which events are not simply random as they are in the Greek adventure novel, but instead connected to the characters’ larger lives, the places in which they occur must themselves become significant and concrete. Bakhtin notes that abstract social hierarchies forestall this continuity between individual parts of the whole


human community. In a passage later in the chronotope essay describing medieval hierarchy, the value that Bakhtin places on the articulation of such continuities is especially clear: Amid the good things of this here-and-now world are also to be found false connections that distort the authentic nature of things, false associations established and reinforced by tradition and sanction by religious and official ideology. Objects and ideas are united by false hierarchical relationships, inimical to their nature; they are sundered and separated from one another by various other-worldly and idealistic strata that do not permit these objects to touch each other in their living corporeality. (169)

Bakhtin assumes here that a whole and natural unity exists in everyday human life at the level of physical interaction, and that this unity can be sundered by abstract schema imposed mechanically on that unity. In the case of narrative, this abstract schema is the ultimately disunified (or, we might say, only weakly unified) structure of adventure time, organized around ruptures rather than continuities. Bakhtin sees the coherence provided by the body not only in individual bodies, but also in more symbolic bodies. Critics have sometimes seen Bakhtin’s writing on the human body to be contradictory, since it treats the individual body both as an object that resists order and, at the same time, as something that needs to be subordinated to larger cosmological patterns. One part of Bakhtin’s writing—the best-known part often taken unfairly to characterize his theory as a whole—valorizes the “carnivalesque” body as the site of a trans-human physical continuity that ultimately works against all social structure and stratification. Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as fusing the individual with the outside world, both because it is constantly invested with symbolic values that transcend an individual, and because this body is literally linked to the cosmos and to aspects of the physical world through these symbolic qualities: “It stresses elements common to the entire cosmos: earth, water, fire, air; it is directly related to the sun, to the stars. It contains the signs of the zodiac. It reflects the cosmic hierarchy. This body can merge with various natural phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands, and continents. It can fill the entire universe.”9 Here physical continuity within a whole community is not established by virtue of a single human biography—as it is in Bakhtin’s work on the chronotope—but rather through the superindividual grotesque body that dominates Rabelais’s writing.10 In both cases, Bakhtin articulates both the unruly and the general body together. It is for this reason that Bakhtin remarks, “The events of the grotesque sphere are always developed on the boundary dividing one body from the other and, as it were, at their points of intersection. One body offers


its death, the other its birth, but they are merged in a two-bodied image” (322). In just the way that we have noted in Brooks and Frye, the plot moves toward an overarching bodily image—for example, of the purified body of the sinner Lucius. And it makes this movement toward such a body by deploying another, unruly body that resists that overarching body. Here plot emerges at the moment that these two bodies are imagined and related to each other. The unruly body takes many different forms that in turn reflect very different ways of thinking about narrative. Bakhtin emphasizes how the unruly body is transformed into a representation of the private life that works against official hierarchy. We have already seen White describe the unruly body as a mass of resisting, brute events that have no order before narrative. Likewise, transformations in the meaning of the unruly body within conventional plots have emerged as an important issue within histories of the early modern novel. Nancy Armstrong’s influential Desire and Domestic Fiction is perhaps the strongest example of the way in which critics have changed our understanding of the cultural meaning of desire and the body in early novelistic discourse. Armstrong claims that desire is transformed into new social forms by a novel like Richardson’s Pamela. Armstrong notes that this novel fundamentally reworks the notion of power as located within the aristocratic body: If the male’s forcible penetration of her [Pamela’s] body assaults the very life of the non-aristocratic woman herself, then the master’s exercise of his power over bodies of those within his household amounts to murder. It destroys their value. Thus with a stroke Richardson forces the reader to condemn the political system that authorizes the exercise of such power. By rewriting the female body in this fashion, Richardson overturned the basis on which political relationships were understood as natural and right.11

According to Armstrong, Richardson’s novel is typical of the transformation of power based on gender in the early novel, where middle-class domestic models come to replace older aristocratic ways of thinking about power and right. For our purposes in thinking about plot and the unruly body, Armstrong’s discussion makes clear that these novels will read desire, and thus the demands of the individual body, in very different ways. Pamela is an object of sexual desire for Mr. B, and the meaning of that individual body initially seems to be obvious—indeed, it seems to be barely unruly, since older aristocratic models suggest that “[b]y virtue of being master of the estate and thus of all the personnel and objects therein, Mr. B already possesses—as he reminds Pamela—the thing he most desires” (113). By rejecting this possession, Richardson


rewrites Pamela’s body as unruly in a much stronger sense. As this example makes clear, the unruly body is not a natural thing—something that inherently resists meaning or social use by virtue of its materiality—but rather a discursive object very much constructed to make sense in the light of the general body to which it is contrasted. Narrative bodies will, then, be unruly in ways sympathetic to the story’s plot and to the general body that supports it. A very sophisticated example of the ways in which general and unruly bodies are articulated together is provided by G.M. Goshgarian in To Kiss the Chastening Rod, a study of domestic fiction in the American Renaissance. Goshgarian notes a common contradiction within American culture of this time, which describes the body as naturally both spiritual and corrupt. Goshgarian notes “a philosophical crux within the new theories of education”: Post-Calvinist educators educed natural goodness: they could bring out children’s virtue because children were already virtuous. Yet the very idea of a pedagogy presupposed that children were not so virtuous that they could do without their educators: educating the natural love of constraint inevitably involved constraining nature. The logical conclusion seemed to be that spiritualizing human nature was a matter of playing it against itself. Education must be a matter of enlisting children’s innocence in the crusade against their corruptibility.12

Goshgarian goes on to describe the way in which American culture of this period sees the child as necessarily needing surveillance, especially to protect against fears of “masculine ‘incontinence,’ ” implying a “complex economy linking excessive ejaculation to the (potentially lethal) depletion of male energies, the degradation of white women, and the prospective decline of Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization” (46). Such fears play out contradictions within the American body. The narrative solution that results from this body is to imagine women—especially mother figures— as the means of training the body back to purity: “Through her, the divided body could redeem itself. Women’s natural purity, the domesticators insisted, made man’s degeneracy accessible to the remedial techniques of the normalizing order” (47). Because this naturally innocent and corrupt body not only must be trained against corruption, but must also express its natural innocent desires, the mother figure in narratives of this period appears as a very strange mixture of parent and love object: Why did the ungoverned body crave her good government? If the campaign against self-abuse was not to fly in the face of normalizing

plot and the unruly body / 101 fundamentals, something more than the aggrieved mother’s “no” had to curb the onanist: the man-child had to acquire a natural love for a constraint he would otherwise simply chafe under. What ensured that he would was his passion for his passionless mother. The affair between antimasturbatory mother and her autoerotic son, the normalizers’ paradigm of true love and perfect union, was the driving force behind efficient moral education. (50)

This strange discursive pattern that treats the mother as both passionless disciplinarian and love object suggests how deeply interwoven general and resistant bodies are. While the mother seems to represent the broader social body to which the culture strives, Goshgarian makes clear that the meaning of that body depends entirely on the desirous masculine body that gives it meaning and that creates narrative tension. Unruly and general social bodies here are deeply entwined. As this example implies, narratives need not necessarily resolve the tension between general and unruly bodies. Many feminist critics have noted that narratives demand conventional plot resolutions that frequently work against the interests of women characters. Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes in her study, Writing Beyond the Ending, the direct conflict between conventional bildung narratives of female education and the expectations of romance plots: “This contradiction between love and quest in plots dealing with women as a narrated group, acutely visible in nineteenthcentury fiction, has, in my view, one main mode of resolution: an ending in which one part of that contradiction, usually quest or Bildung, is set aside or repressed, whether by marriage or by death.”13 The point here is both straightforward and far-reaching. Narratives certainly can create plots that reflect more than one trajectory based on more than one general body. DuPlessis suggests, for example, a tension between the developmental body of the bildung narrative and the broader reproductive body of the romance narrative. In this case, although a narrative can create delay by positing one or more unruly bodies, the resolution at which the narrative will eventually arive need not actually resolve these various bodies.

Imagining Interiority Plot, then, creates temporal expanse by imagining a gap between two types of bodies—an overarching and an individual body. This gap is certainly most obvious in very traditional plots, where an initially unruly romantic desire is eventually integrated into social norms and


leads to the reproduction of the family body.14 It is clear, however, that such patterns account for a relatively small portion of the plots of modern narrative, and that such narratives frequently treat time in a much more sophisticated way. Having defined what I take to be the basic dynamic inherent in narrative plot, I would like to consider in the remainder of this chapter the ways in which this model is transformed and complicated. Bakhtin’s discussion of the early novel at the end of the previous section suggests how this plot model easily becomes complicated, since for Bakhtin the modern novel involves a gap between exterior world and private space. For Bakhtin, modern understandings of narrative space and time emerge at the same time as an appreciation of private life, which in turn depends on the unruly body. Bakhtin notes that one of the things that characterizes Apuleius’s novel is its emphasis on personal life. When Lucius is transformed into an ass, it not only ties him to an alienating body and subjects him to a number of accidents beyond his control, but it also gives him insight into lives to which he would normally have no access: “The everyday life that Lucius observes and studies is an exclusively personal and private life. By its very nature there can be nothing public about it. All its events are the personal affairs of isolated people: they could not occur ‘in the eyes of the world,’ publicly, in the presence of a chorus” (122). Precisely this personal life is what is missing in the adventure novel, and its lack makes the experiences of the hero and heroine ultimately irrelevant to their eventual union. Transformation in The Golden Ass is linked to the gap between public events and private experience. The body, in turn, provides a natural means of articulating this tension between public and private, between interior experience and exterior event. This gap can be used by narrative in many different ways. In the novel itself, this gap is meaningful mostly because it defines the individual body and renders it unruly to the larger perspective of the society. But Bakhtin’s observation about perspective also suggests a very different way in which a gap between an unruly and an overarching or social body can be created by a story.15 Unruly bodies can function at the level of narrative event—creating situations or actions that work against larger social patterns. But individual bodies can also create narrative unruliness through the perspectives that they engender. Lucius, after all, is launched into a narrative plot not because his desire conflicts with society, but because his point of view on the story as an ass is so radically disassociated with conventional ways of seeing the world that it demands to be resolved. This perceptual gap between interior world and exterior society is another way in which the


dual bodies that I have been describing in this chapter can be deployed to create narrative plot. Paul Ricoeur’s work on time and narrative approaches plot through the gap between exterior and interior worlds, and his discussion provides us with terms that are helpful in understanding the way that the body serves to make this gap narratively meaningful. In Time and Narrative Ricoeur approaches narration from a phenomenological perspective. He develops this understanding initially by discussing time and plot in Augustine and Aristotle. In Augustine’s Confessions, Ricoeur finds a hesitating movement away from cosmological ways of marking time, and instead a gradual acceptance of a phenomenology of what Husserl later comes to call “internal time consciousness.” In contrast to Plato’s treatment of the subject in Timaeus, Augustine rejects celestial motion as an absolute marker of time: “Augustine alone dares to allow that one might speak of a span of time—a day, an hour—without a cosmological reference. The notion of distentio animi will serve, precisely, as a substitute for this cosmological basis for the span of time.”16 According to Ricoeur, the concept of distentio or distension is crucial to Augustine’s theory. It marks Augustine’s attempt to think about the mind as holding together three “presents”—the remembered past, the anticipated future, and the present moment. Ricoeur writes, “The notion of distentio animi has not been given its due so long as the passivity of the impression has not been contrasted with the activity of a mind stretched in opposite directions, between expectations, memory, and attention. Only a mind stretched in such different directions can be distended ” (18). Throughout this study I have focused on the tension between overarching plots that reconcile events and the temporal delay that comes with that plot. Ricoeur treats this as an essential element of Augustine’s philosophy of time: Augustine’s inestimable discovery is, by reducing the extension of time to the distention of the soul, to have tied this distention to the slippage that never ceases to find its way into the heart of the threefold present— between the present of the future, the present of the past, and the present of the present. In this way he sees discordance emerge again and again out of the very concordance of the intentions of expectation, attention, and memory. (21)

In the concept of distention, Ricoeur’s offers a version of the tension between temporal wholeness and unruliness that we have observed throughout this chapter. We have seen a similar tension articulated by critics whenever they seek to describe narrative plot as a whole that has


been stretched—in this case, by the unruly body and liminal events that it struggles to organize. Ricoeur’s is a decidedly uncorporeal theory of plot and human time, and we can see his approach to narrative as an attempt to describe distention without reference to the bodies that we have emphasized in the first part of this chapter. In doing so, Ricoeur exemplifies what we can call the sublimation of the body within modern ways of thinking about plot. As Ricoeur suggests, what makes the distention of the soul the center of a theory of time is precisely Augustine’s attempt to escape from external regulation (the movement of the planets, e.g.) as the definition of time. Augustine attempts, in other words, to move out of the world and into the mind as the basis of what has seemed to others before him to be either a cosmological or a material issue. In focusing on the mind, Augustine locates narrative in the perception of several “nows.” This mental model of narrative departs rather explicitly from the chronological one described by White. Temporality here is more complex, as will be the body’s role in organizing the relation between unifying whole and a resistant part. Augustine’s theory of distentio animi raises the issue of the relationship between an internal time consciousness and an external regulation of time. It has been my thesis throughout this chapter that narratives do not become distended by themselves, that narrative constructs the things that resist it at the same time that it creates the order that seems to emerge out of that organizing effort. The gap that Ricoeur describes between inside and outside world can be read as another, more complex instance of the same attempt to produce both order and unruliness. Phenomenological interiority, in other words, can be read as a trope invented to satisfy narrative demands. In constructing interiority, these theories hark back in subtle but essential ways to the corporeal terms in which narrative plot has been imagined. Interiority is understood as the obverse of the body; it is what resides within the body, independent of or at least tangentially related to events in the material world.17 The relationship between interiority and a certain redeployment of the body within narrative time characteristic of modern culture is nicely encapsulated by the way that sociologists have spoken about the “synchronization” of individual and social time. Tamara Hareven summarizes the direction of recent work on synchronization in an article on family time: The concept of time as a historical construct has been discussed almost exclusively by historians concerned with the transition from task- and season-related work patterns and ways of life to industrial time discipline.

plot and the unruly body / 105 For example, the importance of modern industrial time schedules has been a recurring theme in labor history, where it was first presented by E.P. Thompson. Thompson emphasized the introduction of the industrial time clock and discipline as a dramatic and traumatic watershed in the history of Western society.18

Hareven describes a rift that appears within the temporal schemes of individual and society with the introduction of modern industrial culture. Where seasonal patterns previously provided natural ways to regulate and shape the human experience of time, these patterns must be recreated artificially in modern production.19 Inner time consciousness obviously appears because of the feeling that such an artificial temporal scheme has been imposed upon the individual. In this sense, interiority is at odds with the social and artificial cycles defined by the external world. Thus, if the outside world is to be imagined as ordering the body, then the mind is a shelter from that order, what resists and fights against external time. Interior life, however, must return to the body and its external regulation if it is achieve a shape and order. I will try to show that bodily interiority within modern thinking fulfills the same dichotomous relationship to time that we have seen in all theories of narrative plot. A classic example of the narrative deployment of this gap is provided by the Quentin section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The novel of course moves back and forth within a family history and forces readers to sort out events told in radically achronological order from various characters’ perspectives. The second section of the novel is set in the earliest of the four “presents” of the novel, although like all of the sections it moves between the present of the section (1910) and memories of much earlier periods. In this section, however, Faulkner is offering the most explicit meditation on the theme of time worked out within the practice of the novel. As we will recall, the section narrates the day when Quentin commits suicide, although the preparations for the act figure in only tangentially. Quentin announces his concern for time at the very outset of this section, observing how he can tell time using the shadow cast by the window sash. Indeed, the beginning and ending of this section are strongly marked by Quentin’s awareness of external, mechanical time: “Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”20 Faulkner’s handling of time contrasts the internal experience of time and the toll of the bells that frequently interrupts this temporal experience. Indeed, we get the clearest and most coherent narrative of Quentin’s relationship with Caddy and his reasons for suicide only when he leaves the town and its external time regulation


and travels into the country, where he is able to reminisce without such interruptions. As with so many modernist novels, Faulkner has chosen to use the form provided by the external clocks that dominate life in town to give Quentin’s fluid experience of past and present free rein within those boundaries. It is only because Quentin has a defined trajectory for the day marked out by the measure of the clock that Faulkner is able to delve into Quentin’s memories so fully. Narrative plot, in other words, is constructed through these external regulations of time. They are what give us our sense of narrative trajectory and the feeling of closure at the end of the section. Although the device of the tolling bells seems primarily to define an overall plot shape for the section, Faulkner’s distinction between internal and external time also provides an essential means of creating what I have called narrative distention. Faulkner needs to provide a trajectory within the present of the text (the day in 1910 when Quentin commits suicide), but he also needs to fill the time between those bell tolls. Indeed, the tolling works only because it occurs as an interruption, as a device that yanks us out of one experience of time and inserts us into another. In this sense, Faulkner’s novel accomplishes precisely what I have claimed all narrative does: it creates an overall plot shape while also creating the conditions that resist that shape. It is clear as well in this novel that Faulkner imagines the relation between plot and distention through the body. Throughout the novel, it is the external world that interrupts Quentin’s mind through the tolling of the bell. Indeed, very early in this section Quentin attempts to escape from this external time by destroying his watch, in the process cutting his hand. Later in the section blood again intrudes on Quentin’s thoughts when he loses a fight and returns to his room to change clothes and clean up (205). The body’s relationship to outside time is captured by Quentin’s mental observation about the weights that he will use to drown himself: “There was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you don’t want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares” (102). In this sense the body is precisely what moves Quentin along toward the suicide that ends the plot. In these cases, the body of the narrative present is allied with the external regulation of time, and intrudes upon his thoughts to force him to return to the external time that he is trying to escape. The body here seems to be equated to plot and to function as the “other” to the more fluid and undirected nature of inner time and consciousness. But Quentin’s internal experience of time is also equated with the body in important ways. Quentin moves relentlessly toward his suicide because he has chosen a particular time for that act, a time regulated by


external clocks. At the same time, however, it becomes clear in the course of the section that the motivation for that suicide is the inability to escape from his own memories of Caddy. Suicide is not imposed by some external social rule; quite the opposite, since Quentin is refusing responsibilities that he inherited when his father decided to sell Benjy’s pasture to pay for his tuition at Harvard. Rather, suicide emerges as a necessity precisely because of the painful, disorganized force of Quentin’s raw memories of Caddy. This is obvious when Quentin’s memories of Caddy and Dalton Ames flow seamlessly into his fight in the narrative present with Gerald shortly before returning to town. Not only are his thoughts about Caddy the reason for his fight (“did you ever have a sister did you” [199]), but the blood from the fight and the physical quality of Quentin’s memories are juxtaposed: she took my hand and held it flat against her throat now say his name Dalton Ames I felt the first surge of blood there it surged in strong accelerating beats say it again her face looked off into the trees where the sun slanted and where the bird say it again Dalton Ames her blood surged steadily beating and beating against my hand It kept on running for a long time, but my face felt cold and sort of dead, and my eye, and the cut place on my finger was smarting again. I could hear Shreve working the pump, then he came back with the basin. . . . (203)

These memories are clearly driven by a largely uncontrollable, bodily series of desires and obsessions. The duality is likewise remarked by Quentin’s father: “Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function. Excrement Father said like sweating” (94). Here external regulation produces something bodily that seems other than it—an abject excrement, to use Kristeva’s term.21 We can say, likewise, that the internal time consciousness is produced as a kind of bodily excess that works against but is also deeply involved with the overall time of the external plot. Just as we have seen in theories of plot by Frye and Brooks, both sides of this narrative equation are imagined in bodily terms. Faulkner’s treatment of time in The Sound and the Fury depends, then, on two bodies—an externally regulated body and an individual, unruly body—to construct his narrative. He departs from the sort of


narrative plot that we saw earlier in this chapter by locating these two bodies in constant juxtaposition through the narrative in the tension between external time and internal consciousness. Rather than making this external social body appear only in the end of the narrative or as a norm through the story, Faulkner’s modernist method makes the tension between the two a constant element of his storytelling method, present in the movement between external events and internal memories. To suggest that our belief in an internal time and in private mental life emerges as an obsession within the modernist novel merely to satisfy narrative demands is clearly to overstate the power of these demands. Nonetheless, critics have long recognized that our ways of thinking about interiority are heavily conditioned by our cultural context. One element of that context, I am suggesting, is the role that this interiority can play within narrative plots—in particular the way in which it can rework the unruly body as the basis for constructing narrative trajectories. We can say that inner life emerges in the modern novel not only because of social, economic, philosophical, and political forces—all of which have been and will continue to be discussed extensively by narratologists and cultural historians—but also because of dynamics inherent to the relationship between time, narrative, and the body. Practicing the World’s Time In the previous section, I suggested that the opposition between external, socially constructed time and internal experiential time has played an important part in negotiating tensions that have always been inherent in how we think about narrative. By deploying the distinction between these two ways of understanding time, we can define narrative distention in a flexible and powerful way that frees us from the need for an overarching bodily model along the lines of what we have seen in Frye or Brooks. As a result, we can observe within modernist literature and within the modern novel in general a growing awareness that plot can take many shapes. Whereas we associate traditional plots with events of a more narrow “bodily” nature—birth, death, and marriage—modern plot seems considerably freer in constructing an overall narrative trajectory without strictly following these human bodily milestones. Before we leave the subject of the invention and deployment of this distinction, we should recognize how fundamental a role it plays within contemporary thinking about subjectivity. Within the last fifteen years, it has become a commonplace to describe cultural identity as “practiced” or “performed.” Foucault, of course, is best known for arguing that


ideology is not an abstract system of language or beliefs—in the terms that we might have expected earlier in this century—but rather a series of settings and events that power demands.22 These are narrative terms; performative theories of subjectivity are ultimately narrative in nature. Furthermore, I would like to suggest, this narrative understanding of subjectivity repeats the model of body and plot that I have been discussing in this chapter. This shift from a conceptual to a narrative understanding of ideology is precisely the trajectory of Foucault’s work from The Order of Things (1966) and Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) to Discipline and Punish (1975) and the later volumes of The History of Sexuality (1984). In Foucault’s early, structuralist period, hegemony is treated as a kind of system or table according to which individuals imagine and interpret the world. In the middle period of Discipline and Punish, it is precisely the training of the body and mind that is at issue. Foucault’s work here remains somewhat ambiguous. Disciplinary institutions function to educate subjects into a kind of behavior, and thus to create philosophical and moral concepts like the soul for the sake of power and social stability. In this sense, these institutions depend on the souls that they create to validate them. These institutions define the particular sites in which individual behaviors are staged and enacted. They are, in some sense, the settings in which the narrative of selfcreation is staged. And yet, many critics have seen Foucault’s work in this period as implying a monolithic notion of society and power that gives institutions the power to determine individual subjectivity absolutely.23 As we move into the emphasis on practice in his last work— “how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire”24—behavior is being staged in a particular place at a particular time and the actual performance of these behaviors is important to the power operating. Especially in this last work, Foucault’s theory of the subject repeats narrative patterns that emphasize setting and event in a way that earlier models of ideology based on static epistemes do not. I have already applied this model of performance to narrative plot when I drew on Judith Butler’s theory of materialization earlier in this chapter. Butler constructs a plot very much like those that we have seen throughout this chapter, where materiality fights against social bodies. When Butler describes this materiality, she grants it the same kind of narrative-resistant role that we have associated with the body throughout this chapter. Critics like Foucault and Butler who speak about social “performance” or the “practice” of everyday social life, then, “narrativize” our ways of thinking about institutional and social norms. Indeed, narrative


theorists have been relatively slow to investigate the ways in which these theories of practice overlap with theories of narrative. The transition to a narrative understanding of ideology is especially evident in the work of Michel de Certeau, who uses Foucault’s theory of individual practice precisely to suggest that institutional places are always sites in which individuals perform. When de Certeau offers the concept of individual “tactics” in The Practice of Everyday Life, it is explicitly in response to the kind of overarching institutional spaces that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish. For him the wandering paths of footsteps within the city is paradigmatic of the kind of anti-institutional spatial practices that he seeks to describe: “Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’ ”25 De Certeau here is clearly describing an understanding of city space based particularly on individual events and actions. Indeed, he goes on immediately after this passage to discuss “pedestrian speech acts” (97). Like Foucault’s last work and Butler’s recent writing, de Certeau understands power as an individual performance staged in a particular place and time, and thus conforming to the general outlines of narrative. Unlike Foucault and Butler, however, de Certeau is explicit about the narrative quality of everyday performance: “In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a ‘metaphor’—a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories” (115). It is clear in this passage that de Certeau uses narrative to explain how spaces become meaningful.26 By describing this process of making space meaningful as a kind of a narrative, de Certeau makes clear his way of thinking about everyday behavior as staged within a particular space narrative. What makes possible this narrative understanding of ideology, I would suggest, is precisely the modern plot based on the distinction between external and internal temporalities. This is especially clear in de Certeau’s theory, where narration is theorized as a kind of act that creates another temporality: “Narration does indeed have a content, but it also belongs to the art of making a coup: it is a detour by way of a past (‘the other day,’ ‘in olden days’) or by way of a quotation (a ‘saying,’ a proverb) made in order to take advantage of an occasion and to modify an equilibrium by taking it by surprise. Its discourse is characterized more by a way of exercising itself than by the thing it indicates” (79).


Here the telling of a story creates a detour through another time that works against official times sanctioned by formal society. We have associated exactly the same understanding of time with modern narrative through a reading of Faulkner, where we noted that the mind seemed to offer a kind of detour away from the official times marked by the ringing of the town clock. De Certeau clearly does not simply oppose individual perception and official time, but he does seem to be imagining something that is resistant to these overarching times precisely because of its individuality. When de Certeau contrasts the multiplicity of footsteps to the formal city spaces, he suggests that particularity works against such generalities. This is why speech acts provide a model for his understanding of city space and narration. Although individual agency is not unfettered in the way that traditional humanism would imagine it, it is active and directed to some end. Because of that agency, according to de Certeau, individual times detour from official ones. Throughout this chapter I have suggested that narrative involves shuttling between two bodies; we can see both at work in de Certeau’s theory. De Certeau suggests that everyday practice involves inhabiting one’s body in a particularly concrete way; he also suggests a more general body that jockeys with this concrete body. He contrasts the totalizing view of city space by rising to the top of the World Trade Center with everyday footsteps: Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the “geometrical” or “geographical” space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical conclusions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations (“ways of operating”), to “another spatiality” (an “anthropological,” poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of a bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city. (93)

The “bustling” space of the city, in which one is immersed in everyday “pedestrian practice,” is contrasted to the abstract space imagined from a totalizing perspective. Precisely this totalizing space and perspective is associated, following Foucault, with the prison and with other types of modern mechanistic systems for sorting and moving people like the railway. Such totalizing images of the body and its proper organization are always at odds with the kind of temporal “detours” that narrative makes possible.27 As we have seen throughout, the dual temporality necessary


for narrative is imagined as the intersection between two types of bodies. Somewhat like earlier models of plot, the individual body for de Certeau appears unruly. But much more in the style of modern narrative, this unruliness is imagined through the gap between external, socially instituted time and an interior time linked to agency. In just this way, we can say, current theory of individual “practice” or “performance” repeats modern plot models. Embodying the Implied Reader Before concluding this discussion of the body in theories of narrative plot, I would like to push one step further my comments in the previous section that changes in narrative models manifest themselves in critical as well as creative writing. As I have suggested, although the basic dynamic of overarching and unruly body is inherent to narrative plot, it can take many different forms that initially may seem to have little to do with narrative temporality and the body. In many ways, de Certeau’s writing on practice represents a kind of a narrative theory since it explicitly formulates narrative as a component of social activity. What happens, however, when critics speak about and analyze narratives? It is no great leap, I think, to suggest that narrative theorists are themselves telling a story about the reading process. They create characters (the reader and author), events (moments of confusion and revelation), and a general plot (the movement from misunderstanding to enlightenment). At the close of this chapter, I would like to argue—much as I have in earlier chapters—that narratology itself is a narrative production. Specifically, I would like to suggest that narratology’s language of “implied readers” merely transforms the narrative model of distention produced out of the gap between internal and external time. We can say that the narratology of reader response criticism is simply the next stage of narrative plot, and that it thus continues the tradition of using the body to mark the gap between overarching and resisting narrative orders. As I have suggested, the paradigmatic example of the narratological negotiation of texts is reader response criticism, which itself constructs a “story” used to describe the process of reading—all to the end of explaining what a proper understanding of the narrative constitutes.28 Although there is a great deal of variety within reader response criticism, two components seem to be essential: a focus on the gradual process by which the meaning of and response to a work unfold, and the gap between what we can take to be a proper, final meaning and partial or mistaken responses that are generated along the way. Theoretically,


response criticism develops from a commonsensical observation that our understanding of a text is incomplete at least until we have completed a first reading. In contrast to interpretations that speak about a text as if it were perceived all in an instance, response criticism rightly recognizes that an essential component of narrative is the time that it takes to read, and the way that our ideas and expectations change during the process. Out of this realization, reader response criticism has developed a method of reading that posits an ideal process of expectation, frustration, and reconception. Crucial to this theory in whatever form it takes is some notion of an “implied” or “ideal” reader whose responses are anticipated and used by the text. This concept of an implied reader is essential to response criticism because critics can follow the implied vicissitudes of this reader in order to discuss the “meaning” of the work even while they admit that meaning cannot be separated from the process by which it emerges. So long as we can speak about an implied reader and a series of responses that are anticipated and therefore “contained” within the text,29 critics have a role in explaining the meaning of narratives. As a result of the concept of the implied reader, response criticism posits two different readerly positions—that of the knowing critic and that of the unknowing reader. The reader’s gradual movement toward the critic’s position during the course of the novel marks an inevitable closing off of possibilities, as mistakes are corrected and the range of ways of understanding a work narrows. Wolfgang Iser describes this process as a matter of “consistency building”: “The wandering viewpoint [of the reader] is a means of describing the way in which the reader is present in the text. This presence is at a point where memory and expectation converge, and the resultant dialectic movement brings about a continual modification of memory and an increasing complexity of expectation.”30 In the end, a reader whose way of understanding corresponds faithfully to the text’s implied reader will see the work in largely the same way that the critic does. Certainly differences remain, since the reader may well not attend to the temporal components of the way that this meaning has emerged—as the response critic will. But by the end of the work the readerly and critical understanding of the work overlap in important ways—their perspectives have been largely reconciled. This characterization of reader response criticism is no doubt unfair on some level, since it describes the most general and simplistic urge within the methodology. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of practical criticism that approaches narrative in precisely this way, in part because as a method it is extremely effective for speaking about textual features.31 For our purposes, this methodology is important because it


creates what we have called narrative distention in a rather different way. This model repeats some of the features of the modern narrative distinction between inner and outer time. It produces this gap, however, not by emphasizing the reader’s bodily position in the world, but by reference to the critic’s seemingly atemporal position outside of the work. Whereas Faulkner sets Quentin’s consciousness in contrast to the tolling of the town bell, response critics set the reader’s particular sense of time in contrast to that of the critic who surveys key moments within the work in a majestic, apparently all-knowing manner. Earlier we noted that this tension between consciousness and world was developed by emphasizing the individual character’s body, which marked both the source of mind and the alienation from consciousness. In response criticism, the body of the reader is handled in a different way—one quite reminiscent of the most traditional way of creating distention through bodily particularity. It is the reader’s body that dooms him or her to an incomplete understanding of the work until the process of reading is complete. This is precisely the implication of Iser’s well-known description of reading process as a matter of “horizon”: “As perspectives are continually interweaving and interacting, it is not possible for the reader to embrace all perspectives at once, and so the view he is involved with at any one particular moment is what constitutes for him the ‘theme’. This, however, always stands before the ‘horizon’ of the other perspective segments in which he had previously been situated” (97). The reason why a reader cannot hold more than one perspective in his or her mind and thus approximate the atemporal view of the author, is precisely the bodily metaphor of horizon, which relies on our experience of physical location to suggest the limitations of reading. The distention of reading, in this sense, is created by imagining the body of the reader as limiting our “view” and acting as an unruly delaying agent.32 Response criticism reflects a larger pattern of thinking about reading within contemporary narrative. I have in mind in particular the “metafiction” popular at various points and in various countries throughout the twentieth century. Metafiction is characterized by the author apparently “revealing” the conditions under which the story has been constructed, or by stepping outside of his or her role as writer to make changes to the story that work not only against mimesis, but against the very conditions of consistency in the fictional world presented. These novels clearly have a very different relationship to narrative time, since they are frequently at liberty to reverse the movement of plot, to change events that occurred earlier in the story, and so on. And yet at the same time, these novels also obviously imply a concern for the kind of dual narrative position that


we have observed in response criticism. This should not be surprising, since response criticism develops and flourishes in the American academy at the same time that metafiction is discovered and analyzed by those same critics. Indeed, it is a rare book of response criticism that does not pause to discuss some examples of metafiction, just as a great deal of metafiction has been produced by writers associated with academic institutions. The best example of this interaction is probably Umberto Eco’s career, which has moved back and forth between metafictional novels like The Name of the Rose and work in narratology like The Role of the Reader.33 As in response criticism, metafictional narratives distinguish between a naïve reader or character and the informed author who has a degree of control over the story. It is not so much that these narratives do away with narrativity, with our desire to understand what happens to the characters, so much as they deploy narrative distention in a new way. A good example of the way in which contemporary metafictional narrative deploys this reworked model of plot and body is John Barth’s well-known story, “Lost in the Funhouse.” The funhouse of the title is both a literal place in which Ambrose, the story’s main character, gets lost and a metaphor for fiction itself. The story locates Ambrose, the author, and the reader all in the position of the confused reader described by Iser and other response critics—they are caught in the midst of a temporal flux whose end and scope they cannot see. Barth writes as the author, summarizing the experience of Ambrose as well as the reader: “So far there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of a theme. And a long time has gone by already without anything happening; it makes a person wonder. We haven’t even reached Ocean City yet: we will never get out of the funhouse.”34 This confusion is contrasted by Barth to the clarity that is promised—although, ultimately, only partially delivered—at the end of the story. There Ambrose imagines the funhouse that he will construct when he is older as having a center from which the controls of the whole building can be run— an image of god-like power and perception. Barth explicitly associates Ambrose’s desire for this power with his eventually becoming an author: “He envisions a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet utterly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ. Nobody had enough imagination. He could design such a place himself, wiring and all, and he’s only thirteen years old. He would be its operator: panel lights would show what was up in every cranny of its cunning of its multifarious vastness” (97). Barth creates the contrast between readerly and authorial perspective through sexuality and desire. The focus of the story itself is on adolescent sexuality, and the promise


of the funhouse is one of imagined sexual freedom for Ambrose: “In the tumbling-barrel, too, just inside the Devil’s-mouth entrance to the funhouse, the girls were upended and their boyfriends and others could see up their dresses if they cared to. Which was the whole point, Ambrose realized. Of the entire funhouse!” (89). In contrast to this ever-present sexual desire that moves Barth’s story along, the image of the author is associated with a kind of disembodiment that, instead, can see and master the eroticism of the funhouse. As Barth writes, Ambrose “will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses were designed” (97). The tension here, then, is between an individual desirous and some other body that stands outside of the exploits of readers “lost in the funhouse” of the story. The resolution promised by this plot is not, however, that of the cyclical patterns of individual and general bodies in Frye, or even the tension between external and internal world by Faulkner. Instead, it is a balance between being inside and outside of the story—being the manipulated reader or the controlling author. Narratology, then, participates with the corporeal tensions in its ways of thinking about plot and time. Contemporary metafictional writing— both that of the novels that I have been discussing, as well as the narratological impulse to narrate the act of reading—repeats and transforms traditional models for narrative time. This writing continues to use the unruly body as the vehicle for discussing narrative distention. While response criticism’s focus on the mind and reading seems to depart from the emphasis on the body, we have seen that the tension between reader and author is figured in corporeal terms. In this case, the duality is produced not through the individual and general body, or through the interior and exterior body, but through the manipulated and manipulating body.

CHAPTER 4 The Body and Kinetic Space

No aspect of narrative appears, at first blush, to have a more direct connection to the human body than space. The concept of setting itself implies an interest—somewhat uncharacteristic for narratology, as we have seen—in the physical location of characters. Indeed, it may be setting’s intimate connection to physical placement and the human body that has led narratology to pay it relatively little attention. Abstract textual models of “spatial form” have garnered their share of attention from narrative theorists. Likewise, especially in discussions of film narratologists have discussed setting as a component of narrative “discourse”—as a way of shaping our experience of presented events and characters.1 Very few critics, however, have discussed the role of setting within the construction of plot, action, and character—at the level of narrative “elements,” to use the common distinction. We are far more likely to find commentary on setting in an introductory-level student handbook or writing guide than we are to uncover analysis from narratologists. An anthology like The Norton Introduction to Literature (1995) suggests that setting functions either to provide a background atmosphere that helps us to understand the characters, or by symbolizing a way of life or value system.2 Rudimentary as these remarks are, they are the few examples that we have of attempts to characterize setting as a narrative element. In this chapter I would like to discuss the role of the human body in giving meaning to narrative setting. As I have suggested at many points throughout this study, narrative depends upon embodied character action. As such, space is animated above all by character movement— real as well as imagined. In focusing on character movement within and between settings, I will develop here what I will call a “kinetic” model of setting. I will suggest in this chapter that we might read narrative change as inherently related to the change of location, and make the unending movements of kinetic space inherent to narrative itself.


The Body as a Model for Narrative Space Of all the traditional narrative concepts that this book will discuss, then, narrative space is perhaps the one that most obviously will be illuminated by an emphasis on the human body. Indeed, once suggested, it is relatively easy to see how the human body will resonate with literary space. Sociological criticism of the last twenty years has explored the ways in which cultural space is modeled on the human body, and consequently has concerned itself with the body’s role within representation. Mary Douglas provides an influential discussion of this sort of modeling in Natural Symbols. She writes, [T]he human body is always treated as an image of society and . . . there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension. Interest in its apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits an entrances, escape routes and invasions. If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries. The relation of head to feet, of brain and sexual organs, of mouth and anus are commonly treated so that they express the relevant patterns of hierarchy. Consequently I now advance the hypothesis that bodily control is an expression of social control— abandonment of bodily control in ritual responds to the requirements of a social experience which is being expressed.3

Douglas argues that society is modeled by the body, through which ideas of hierarchy and social order are shaped. Douglas’s theoretical claims about the construction of society have led critics in many areas to investigate how the body and society mirror each other. When Emily Martin considers the metaphor of “flexibility” used to describe the ideal workforce within current capitalist economies, she sees behind this an image of the healthy body and how it responds to illness.4 A number of other cultural and political theories have provided critics with the means to link the body and social spaces, and thinking this relationship has become one of the principle challenges and inspirations within culturally oriented criticism in many fields. Foucault, as we were reminded in chapter 3, provides an influential source for current cultural criticism’s linking of the human body and social space. Foucault reverses Douglas’s perspective on the body/society relation. Rather than emphasizing the way that society is modeled on the body, Foucault argues that bodies are modeled and regulated by social institutions. We do not need to look far to find examples of criticism in which literary space is modeled on the body. Usually, however, this occurs through the intermediary of the modeling of social space in general.

the body and kinetic space / 119

Thus, a number of critics have noted how the spaces of women’s domestic fiction reflect assumptions about women’s proper “sphere” that themselves are based on particular ideas about the physical differences between men and women. We can see this at work even in a classic text like The Madwoman in the Attic, which describes what the authors call the “body/house” trope.5 This way of imagining female identity depends on traditional patriarchy, which sees women as more pure than men; they consequently need to be sheltered and protected by worldly male action. According to Gilbert and Gubar, this traditional way of thinking about the social space allotted to women produces in literary texts a kind of duplicity. This trope implies that women are imagined either as the otherworldly “angel in the house” that conventional writing describes or the “monster” that Gilbert and Gubar insist is lurking beneath most nineteenth-century women’s writing. The space of the house explicitly claims to protect the ideal angel expected by conventional thinking, but also ends up hiding the “monstrous” female identity that is suppressed by this thinking. Within this theory, literary texts mirror the assumptions about social space in the culture out of which they are produced. Gilbert and Gubar suggest that literary texts manage to do something that social space cannot—they reveal the expectations and contradictions in patriarchal thinking. Nonetheless, literary spaces take the shape that they do because of a prior formation of social space. If the dominant figure of the female in the nineteenth century, the “angel in the house,” is itself a metaphor developed in many different discourses, that figure nonetheless has its basis in concrete spatial arrangements that literally locate women within a domestic space. Although Gilbert and Gubar point out how this metaphor goes beyond this literal spatial arrangement to become a metaphor at the basis of authorship and reproduction of all sorts, and although they also suggest that the metaphor helps to perpetuate that literal spatial distinction, they assume that literary space is ultimately continuous with social space. The assumption that a narrative’s spatial arrangements will primarily obey the demands of larger social processes has certainly led to a body of very rich new historical analysis, especially on the early novel. In this criticism, the body in narrative space is understood as merely a subcategory of social space in general. In turn, the body’s position within this narrative space has to be understood primarily through the way it is defined by that social space. Although this has the advantage of granting the narrative text an importance to the larger sociocultural issues circulating at the time, it makes a discussion of any particularly narrative role for the body in textual space difficult. That is, the new historicist approach to


narrative and bodily space pursues the continuity between narrative and other discourses so tenaciously that we have a hard time recognizing when narrative may rely on the body in particular or special ways. Dorrit Cohn makes this point in her critique of new historicist readings of the relationship between the rise of the novel and the development of disciplinary regimes. In works like D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police or John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary, an equation is made between the growing acceptance of omniscient or free-indirect narration and Foucault’s panopticon as a model for modern forms of discipline. Ultimately Cohn hopes to show that formal novelistic devices can have many potential uses, and that it is simplistic to associate such formal devices with particular ideological structures. But in a broader sense Cohn notes the difficulty that new historicism has in accounting for formal concerns in general: “What enables the positing of the identity [between novel writing and policing] is quite simply a huge rhetorical leap—from matter to manner, mimetic theme or narrative technique. Incomparable differences are left yawning down below: between the nature of political and artistic power, real and fictional worlds, ocular vision enhanced by empirical observation and the uniquely privileged and entirely unreal vision that generic convention grants to ‘omniscient’ novelistic narrators.”6 It should be no surprise, then, that although this criticism has a great deal to say about space and the body, rarely has it explained how narratives use the body to shape or discuss space. And yet, of course, precisely this concern is the heart of space within a corporeal narratology. Corporeal Movement through Narrative Space Let us begin our search for a more inherently narrative theory of textual space with an observation about how we inhabit our bodies in everyday life. Throughout this book I have argued that it is impossible to tell stories without taking account of the bodies at work within them. This is especially the case with settings, since a space only becomes a setting when something is located there. Let us go one step further and observe that we never exactly see the place that we occupy. Occupying a particular setting means looking out from that space to other locations. To suggest this is, to some extent, to adopt the visual model of the body that we have seen Grosz criticize in chapter 2 as a bias of modern culture. Certainly it is the case that we interact with our actual location more directly through touch and smell, and to some extent through hearing as well. But even within Merleau-Ponty’s writing—from which Grosz


draws so much of her theory of touch and the body—it is clear that the body’s position within space must be understood by reference to its possible movements beyond itself. Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception, “What counts for the orientation of the spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation. My body is wherever there is something to be done.”7 Merleau-Ponty suggests that the particular perceptual means by which we imagine the virtual body—although primarily visual, I think—are less important than the fundamental imaginative act of projecting ourselves outward into space. The same, we can say, will be true of narrative setting as well. If we imagine characters as actors participating in a series of events, then we can say that they, too, will project “virtual bodies” and thus imaginatively move beyond their present location. The idea of the virtual or real movement of character bodies within and between settings seems to me to promise a very different way of approaching narrative setting. Such movements are suggested in passing by Elaine Scarry in a discussion of Thomas Hardy. Scarry notes that in Hardy, The text makes continual distinctions between those spaces which can be entered in one’s own body and those spaces which can be entered only with a substitute object such as a tool . . . or some other materialized surrogate . . . as it also makes continual distinctions between boundaries that can be crossed with the sense of touch and those which can only be passed over with some other form of perceptual reach.8

Although Scarry’s observation makes perfect sense, and seems perhaps even to describe an aspect of narrative description that is obvious upon reflection, it marks a fundamental departure from the way that we have seen the corporeal shaping of narrative spaces described above. When critics have spoken about the relationship between the body and literary space, their primary emphasis has been on different methods of modeling this space inspired by the socioeconomic construction of everyday space. What Scarry suggests, in contrast, is the possibility of attending to the ways that bodies can move within and between spaces. Narratives will explicitly or implicitly define different types of spaces organized by bodily access: inaccessible spaces, spaces that can be occupied physically, spaces accessible by surrogate means, spaces accessible by sensory or artificial perception. The kind of dynamics of space and movement that Scarry suggests will have a profound influence on how narratives tell their stories.


Consider, for example, how recent technology has reworked the issue of corporeal access inherited from nineteenth-century realist narrative. It is a fundamental condition of realist narrative that one can only be in one place at one time. When W.J. Harvey describes the modern novel as bringing together many “perspectives” upon given events, he is relying on this assumption about the limitations of human perception and knowledge. As information and communication technologies proliferate, the traditional image of spatial location based on visual metaphors of perspective becomes less and less appropriate. These information media mimic our fundamental, biological means of gathering information sensorially. The simulated experience created by television and reading seems to reach their novelistic apex in recent “cyberspace” fiction. Novelists like William Gibson explore and exploit the narrative implications of technologies that are able to perfectly mimic our everyday senses to create virtual realities. A good example of this is provided by the best known of these novels, Gibson’s Neuromancer. In one of the novel’s most-discussed scenes, one character (Case) is wired with virtual reality technology so that he can share in the physical experiences of another character (Molly). Case is able to “flip” out of Molly’s perspective and back to cyberspace (here called the “matrix”), and vice versa: “The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color. . . . She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers.”9 One of the effects of this technology is to allow Gibson to construct scenes and string together plot in new ways. Case is literally in two scenes at once, and while he is not able to perceive both at once, his ability to skip back and forth instantly allows Gibson to bring together events in a new way. Gibson himself has noted this effect of cyberspace as a concept on the way that he constructs his novels. Gibson remarks in an interview with Larry McCaffery, “When I arrived at the cy[b]erspace concept while I was writing ‘Burning Chrome,’ I could see right away it was resonant in a lot of different ways. By the time I was into Neuromancer, I recognized that it allowed for a lot of moves, because characters can be sucked into apparent realities—which means you can place them in any sort of setting or against any backdrop you want.”10 In the context of our discussion, we can say that such simulation technologies have expanded the kinds of spaces into which individuals can travel. Indeed, the novel’s most noteworthy space, the abstract cyberspace of the matrix itself, is a place that in past literatures would almost certainly be treated as inaccessible. Although Scarry’s emphasis on movement in setting departs in fundamental ways from the static models that critics normally use to


describe narrative space, these movements have been hinted at by some critics. Indeed, Ruth Ronen’s theory of narrative “frames” in her essay “Space in Fiction” seems to me to provide a sophisticated structure for thinking about these movements.11 Rather than speaking about individual places within a narrative, Ronen organizes her discussion around a spatial frame. The advantage of speaking about a particular location as a frame rather than as a space is striking: frames imply a way of distinguishing near and far spaces and setting up transitions between one space and the next. Ronen contrasts the frame to the concept of setting: Frames are fictional places and locations which provide a topographical determination to events and states in the story. Frames differ according to their position in the overall organization of the fictional universe. A setting is distinguished from frames in general in being formed by a set of fictional places which are the topological focus of the story. A setting is the zero point where the actual story-events and story-states are localized.12

Ronen goes on from here to distinguish frame from setting precisely in terms of potentiality: “frames are constructed in the text as potential concrete surroundings characterized by specific features . . . and should therefore be treated as fictional places (constructs) in their own right” (423). In distinguishing between frames and settings, Ronen captures precisely the importance of moment that I have suggested by reference to Scarry. Ronen’s discussion of frames suggests some specific ways in which we can articulate a more detailed theory of this sort of movement through narrative space. Following up from her focus on potential spaces, Ronen goes on to distinguish four types of frames based on their immediacy: the setting is the immediate frame; the secondary frame is separated from the setting by some sort of dividing line; inaccessible frames are not or cannot be actualized as a setting in the story; distant frames may or may not eventually become settings or secondary frames. To this list, Ronen adds a fifth, “generalized” type of fictional space: “A generalized space is constructed when the textual devices used to denote a space denote a non-specific frame, one that has no concrete location within the fictional space, whose boundaries and other specific features are undefined. Their non-specificity disqualifies these frames as immediate surroundings of other fictional elements; at the same time, the generalized space contains the immediate setting relevant to the particular textual context” (428). Such generalized spaces can function to summarize a variety of spaces or to create the equivalent in space of iterative events— types of places that have many instances, but no specific location that is


visited or glimpsed. It is clear that Ronen’s account of fictional space resonates quite well with the type of physical movement that I have been describing. As Merleau-Ponty suggested, spaces always have to be thought in terms of their relationship to a present location and the possibility of moving to these places. Ronen’s observation that distant or secondary frames are relevant to the setting even if they never become an actual site for narrative action accords with Scarry’s focus on perceptual access. Distant frames may not be entered physically, but might be perceptually. By sorting these spaces according to their degree of immediacy, Ronen focuses clearly on the possibility of physical movement between spaces. But Ronen also recognizes that other types of space that cannot be entered physically will still frequently be important to a narrative. She suggests this when she describes inaccessible frames as part of the typology of immediacy, but she addresses the topic more directly when she sorts frames by their degree of factuality. By this she mostly means spaces that are offered as possible-world constructions—spaces that do not exist, but that might. But we can generalize this issue and recognize that spaces will be relevant to a narrative not just when they can be actually entered or seen, but also when they can be imagined. Just as I suggested that we enter distant or secondary spaces through perception, so too we can say that we enter these hypothetical spaces imaginatively. What Ronen’s discussion seems to miss is that narratives frequently allow access even to real spaces only through imagination. As Merleau-Ponty and Scarry have suggested, spaces should be thought in terms of their access from the present location, what Ronen calls a setting, rather than according to their ontological status. Ultimately, this discussion suggests that the meaning of a narrative space is important far more because of the kinds of movements that it opens up than because of the atmosphere or symbolism that it enables. Consider, for example, the contrast between the graveyard scenes in Great Expectations and Hamlet. In Dickens’s novel, the graveyard setting is positioned against a horizon of perceived space that is seen to be corporeally accessible: Pip opens the novel by realizing “that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea.”13 Already the novel imagines Pip’s location against a space that he looks out onto in order to develop “expectations”—in some sense, the exemplary response to the


kind of moving, kinetic space that I have been describing. In contrast, Shakespeare’s graveyard is surrounded not by spaces that can be seen or traveled to, but instead by the “houses” of the grave that “[last] till doomsday.”14 Initially such a space may seem to be entirely rhetorical, but such a house quickly turns out to be the literal destination of Ophelia—and, as Hamlet reminds us, all of us. The graveyard scene here is surrounded by spaces accessible only through the imagination and at the cost of the body. Dickens’s setting is organized by real-world movement outward; the graveyard is a beginning place that holds his family and origin. Shakespeare, conversely, creates a setting in which physical movement is curtailed and directed back to the imaginative spaces that can be entered only by giving up the body. In both cases, however, the meaning of these spaces is created by real and potential movement far more than by the settings themselves. A Typology of Kinetic Space In approaching narrative setting as a matter of the movement between spaces, I am treating narrative as a tissue of actual and possible movements and spaces. From this perspective, we should not say that narratives “have” a particular setting so much as they gesture toward a whole series of spaces. The shift in thinking about setting that I am suggesting here can be associated with the challenge posed to narrative by critics who emphasize the modal quality of narrative worlds. Possible-world theorists have noted that narratives frequently contain reference to unrealized possibilities, expected conditions, wished-for states, and so on. In many ways, our experience of plot is as much defined by the possible events as by the actual events. Marie-Laurie Ryan has offered the following helpful summary of this modal structure of possible worlds, which is worth quoting at some length: To form the image of a world, propositions must be held together by a modal operator acting as a common denominator. In the literal sense of term, a possible world is a set of propositions modalized by the operator of the so-called alethic system: possible, impossible, necessary. . . . Lubomír Doleˇzel enumerates the following systems of modalities: (1) The deonic system, formed by the concepts of permission, prohibition, and obligation. (2) The axiological system, which is assumed to be constituted by the concept of goodness, badness, and indifference. (3) The epistemic system, represented by concepts of knowledge, ignorance, and belief.

126 / narrative bodies While operators of the alethic system relate AW [Actual World] to TAW [Textual Actual World], the other operators relate TAW to the private worlds of characters. The epistemic system determines a knowledge-world (K-world), cut out from the general realm of perceptions; the axiological system determines a wish-world (W-world), extracted from subjective value judgments; and the axiological system determines what I shall call an obligation-world (O-world), dictated by social rules of behavior. In addition to these constructs, which are conceived as either images of TAW (K-world) or as models of what it should be (W-world, O-world), the human mind builds possible worlds as escapes from AW, as true alternatives: dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and fictions. Let us call them fantasy-worlds, or rather, F-universes, since their structure is that of a modal system.15

Ryan’s approach to narrative is a significant departure from traditional accounts of story and discourse, since for her much of the narrative comprises events that never actually occur. These non-actual events and states are organized by a system of modal accessibility. In chapter 1, I discussed the issue of accessibility and noted how it was involved in particular ways of thinking about mimesis and the structure of the narrative. Here the issue of accessibility provides us with a model for thinking about space. As possible-world theorists note, imagined worlds of all sorts (O-worlds, W-worlds, and so on) are always thought on the basis of some shared fictional world (what Ryan calls the TAW) that provides the point around which this structure of possibilities are organized. Like possible-world thinking, narrative space is organized around a starting point that—as Merleau-Ponty has noted—must always be the basis upon which other spaces are thought. And, likewise, what makes these spaces meaningful is less an abstract structure—the sort of patterning that Frank describes as “spatial form”—and more the way in which these spaces can be accessed from this immediate “setting.” In this sense we can read Ronen’s near and distant spaces being accessed physically or perceptually; her possible spaces are accessed imaginatively. Just as Ryan describes a series of modal axes according to which these worlds are organized, so too can we describe a series of principles according to which other spaces can be accessed, and on the basis of which space can be thought within a narrative. And since these principles involve physical movement or perception, we can say that these spatio-modal relations will have a profoundly corporeal structure. Following the pattern of chapter 2, I think that we can describe a series of choices that any narrative must make in creating spaces. I will discuss these in turn in the following sections.


Degree of Access Probably the hardest type of narrative space to imagine is that which is genuinely inaccessible to characters. I have already noted that Ronen includes inaccessibility as one of the degrees of immediacy within space, but I have suggested that the types of spaces that she includes here can frequently entail settings that are actually accessible by other-than-physical means. Indeed, physically inaccessible spaces naturally become the stuff of imagination, and thus can play an important place within narrative. Genuinely inaccessible spaces will be those locations that simply cannot become a meaningful part of the narrative. In a traditional narrative, the blank spaces of a map, although perhaps incapable of physical or perceptual access, can become rich spaces for imagination. In a board game like Monopoly, however, to imagine the next street over from Boardwalk is to think about the game-space in terms fundamentally foreign to its traditional play. Within the game, the spaces beyond the board are inaccessible in a fundamental way, since they are unavailable to physical access (moving a piece to such a hypothetical space), perceptual access (the game does not allow us to glimpse these spaces), or to imaginative projection. The reason why such spaces are disallowed by the game should be obvious: the game depends on a certain scarcity of spaces (hence the name, Monopoly), and to allow access to new spaces simply by moving off of the initial number of spaces would fundamentally change the game. Because narratives usually describe the world more richly than the very restrictive conditions of a board game, the principle that certain spaces must be closed out to allow for the narrative to function is easy to miss. Narratives, however, need to shape space in much the same way in order to construct a meaningful logic of character action and event. Just as a game like Monopoly creates a strict spatial boundary beyond which players cannot travel, so too narratives will depend on disallowing settings and spaces in order to make character choices meaningful. Examples of such necessary spatial boundaries are at work in any narrative. Much of the effectiveness of Odysseus’s inability to find his way home after the Trojan war depends on the relentless horizontality of the Odyssey. The islands that Odysseus visits are located within the ocean controlled by the sea-god Poseidon, and there is no escape—through the air with the help of one of the gods, or over land—from that scheme for organizing locations. We might at first think of these boundaries as primarily technological, attributing Poseidon’s central role within the epic to the available transportation technology within Greek culture. But it is clear that these technological limits are filtered through the


specific narrative concerns that give meaning to the spaces of the story. It is one of the primary goals of Jane Tompkins’s influential rereading of American sentimental fiction, Sensational Designs, to point out precisely these kinds of spatial boundaries in some of the most popular American fiction of the nineteenth century. Tompkins notes the extreme spatial limits of Susan Warner’s ironically named novel The Wide, Wide World as both typical of the gender dynamics of the time, and a reason for its dismissal by critics: Unlike their male counterparts, women writers of the nineteenth century could not walk out the door and become Mississippi riverboat captains, go off on whaling voyages, or build themselves cabins in the woods. Nevertheless, modern critics, as we have seen, persist in believing that what sentimental novelists offered was an easy way out: a few trite formulas for the masses who were too cowardly to face the “blackness of darkness,” too lazy to wrestle with moral dilemmas, too stupid to understand epistemological problems, and too hidebound to undertake “quarrels with God.” But “escape” is the one thing that sentimental novels never offer; on the contrary, they teach their readers that the only way to overcome tyranny is through the practice of a grueling and inexorable discipline.16

As this passage suggests, the strictly delimited scope of this novel can be read as a space of failed imagination or physical travel—a space that should somehow be integrated into the narrative frame. For Tompkins, however, this space marks the border of the narrative, the space that is genuinely inaccessible and that thus gives meaning and shape to the moral choices faced by Warner’s characters. As these examples suggest, the very logic of character action depends on defining a site in which those actions will occur. This site is not simply a location, but should be thought of as a frame in Ronen’s sense—it is a whole network of spaces accessible in every available way. Consider, for example, the structure of spatial frames in Hemingway’s well-known short story, “Hills like White Elephants.” The story is almost without action, and yet concerns itself primarily with possible movement. A man and a woman wait in a Spanish railway station for a train to Madrid that will take the woman for the abortion about which she is ambivalent. This threshold setting of decision is shaped by the spaces that surround the station. The only space mentioned by the story—other than Barcelona from which the train is arriving, and Madrid to which it is traveling—is the hills of the story’s title, which the woman describes as elephants evidently to lighten the mood. Remarkable about the story is that no other space is made available to the woman; the operation that the man has apparently planned seems destined to occur because there is literally only one “track” that faces them. The hills upon which the woman gazes


are clearly inaccessible to her physically and draw attention to her inability to step out of the spatial track that she seems quite sure will make her unhappy. Here spaces are marked off from the available spaces of the story not because of technological reasons or even because of broad cultural assumptions, but in order to make clear the logic of character action within the story. While the boundaries of Hemingway’s story are not immediately corporeal, it should be clear that all of these ultimately depend on an understanding of the limitations and possibilities of the human body. Hemingway’s story is organized around the issue of pregnancy—both in its literal and figurative sense. While the woman is literally pregnant, she is also very much concerned with the figurative pregnancy of the future—the imagined but unrealistic post-abortion world of the couple where everyone is “all so happy.”17 The body here seems to direct the couple down a path that deviates from the whimsical world that they glimpse in the distance, and invalidates other courses of action and directions for movement. Other narratives will shape their spatial limits using the body in a more general and indirect way. We have seen that ideas about how the body can travel, and cultural beliefs about the physical environments in which a person can thrive will all affect the way that a story defines the spaces available to its characters. Means of Access All narratives, then, need to define the limits of accessible space—even though, as I have argued here—what constitutes accessible space is much broader than we usually imagine. It should be clear as well that the real core of any narrative’s space will be the types of accessibility relations that it defines. The types of spaces that a particular immediate location opens onto will define how a character can act and the type of information that he or she has available. We can describe three broad types of spatial access, with important variations within each of these types. The first and most obvious is physical access. Some narratives make physical access to spaces a principle theme for the work. Consider, for example, the Castle of Kafka’s novel of the same name. Although there is no inherent or obvious reason why this space cannot be entered by K., he constantly fails to reach the castle, and we are encouraged to consider why. Here is the description of how K.’s surrogate, Barnabas the messenger, can enter Castle spaces: Is it really Castle service Barnabas is doing, we ask ourselves then; granted, he goes into the offices, but are the offices part of the real Castle?

130 / narrative bodies And even if there are offices actually in the Castle, are they the offices that Barnabas is allowed to enter? He’s admitted into certain rooms, but they’re only a part of the whole, for there are barriers behind which there are more rooms. Not that he’s actually forbidden to pass the barriers, but he can’t very well push past them once he has met his superiors and been dismissed by them. Besides, everybody is watched there, at least so we believe. And even if he did push on further, what good would it be to him if he had no official duties to carry out and was a mere intruder? And you mustn’t imagine that these barriers are a definite dividing line; Barnabas is always impressing that on me. There are barriers even at the entrance to the rooms where he’s admitted, so you see there are barriers he can pass, and they’re just the same as the ones he’s never yet passed, which looks as if one ought not to suppose that behind the ultimate barriers the offices are any different from those Barnabas has already seen.18

This is a tremendously rich passage for thinking about accessible spaces in narrative, since Kafka manages to flirt with many different kinds of spaces in this passage, without ever quite telling us which we are dealing with. At issue within this passage are the conditions of physical access to the Castle. Are these physically accessible spaces whose entrance is simply blocked by practical deterrents, as the fact that he “can’t very well push past them once he has met his superiors and been dismissed” suggests? Much of the novel is built around exploring the conditions under which this space is accessible. As the example of The Castle makes clear, physical access to spaces can occur through a main character, or through a proxy. Many narratives will distinguish between spaces that some characters but not others may enter. This distributed pattern of physically accessible space is as unremarkable as it is common. After all, most of us are confronted on a daily basis with the need to chose one or the other public restroom, and find ourselves barred by social convention from the other. The example that Kafka offers us is subtly different, I think, because it is not clear that Barnabas is simply another character within the novel’s spatial logic. Barnabas functions in the story more as a representative of K.—since we never see the events from his perspective or get a reliable glimpse of his thoughts—and the ambiguity of his motives makes him a problematic device for carrying out actions within the Castle. K. in this sense gains physical access to the Castle only through a proxy, and the difference between direct and indirect physical action is essential to the plot of the novel. Kafka’s novel suggests that we should distinguish between spaces that are available to some characters and not to others, and those spaces that specifically involve mediated actions. In the case of The Castle, it is clear that precisely the theme of bureaucracy and the types of indirect


actions for which no one character is responsible is essential to the narrative. We can see such proxy actions as part of the larger logic of any narrative’s use of space, which will always involve an understanding of how individuals can act. The second type of spatial access is perceptual access. If physical access provides the possibility of actions within a narrative, then perceptual access reflects and shapes the epistemological structure of the narrative. Certainly the dominant means of perceptual access is sight. A classic example in this regard is Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a film that surrounds the apartment of J.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) with spaces accessible only perceptually, as he gazes into their “rear windows” while recovering from a broken leg. Jeffries’s physical condition obviously limits his access to these spaces, and late in the film when he must intervene physically in the spaces beyond his apartment to collect other information or confront the killer that he has been stalking, he can accomplish this only through a proxy character—by sending his fiancée and nurse. Overhearing voices and sounds is a common way in which characters gain access to spaces and information beyond their immediate situation. The dungeon in which Edmond Dantès is imprisoned early in The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, is constructed spatially by sound rather than sight. Despite having a “glimpse of the sky” through his cell window,19 Dantès experiences outside spaces primarily through the voices overheard high above (104) and through the scratching sound of his fellow prisoner digging toward his cell (118). As these examples suggest, the types of spaces to which characters will have perceptual access will obviously and profoundly reflect the epistemology of the narrative. In chapter 1, for example, I noted Jonathan Sawday’s observations about how profoundly dissection changed ideas about the meaning of the body and of space. Where in the past scientists and doctors might have taken the external shape and markings of the body as a sign of everything from cosmological order to individual health, the growing recognition that the body could be diagnostically penetrated and analyzed into anatomical components fundamentally changed the space of the body as well as the epistemology of medicine. More recently, critics have noted how the invention and popularization of devices for imagining the human fetus have changed our thinking about the beginning of human life and shaped debates about the legality of abortion. With the invention of these imaging devices, we are literally creating a space—the “occupied” space of the womb—where none existed before. Once this space is defined and we begin to think about the female body as a place that holds a child, the way in which we know and can act on the body changes.


In the case of these imaging techniques, the body is literally turned into a space upon which individuals can chose to act—the mother, the father, the doctor, and so on. Court decisions upholding the right to abortion based on the “privacy” of this space only confirm this interior body space.20 As this last example suggests, perceptual access can frequently have a direct impact on the structure of action in the work, and may in fact background issues of knowledge or the information gained from these spaces. Perceptual access, after all, is a principle means of establishing and shaping desire. This is precisely what is accomplished in Frederick Douglass’s famous reflections on the sight of free ships in the Chesapeake Bay, which I noted in chapter 2: “You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in the bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll.”21 Such an example draws attention to the physical inaccessibility of the ships and prompts Douglass to reflect on his own situation. Although this distant space can be seen as allowing Douglass to discover something about himself, far more important is how it shapes action and crystallizes his desire to escape: “I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I’ll try it” (76). Here spaces to which a character has only perceptual access nonetheless play an essential role in shaping and directing the desires of the story. We have seen the same thing in the Hemingway story, where the distant hills help to shape the characters’ experience of their present situation, and help to increase the woman’s sense that she has no choice other than the operation. Thus, although perceptual spaces may not be the site of action, they are places that help to shape choices and illuminate the available actions. The third type of spatial access is imaginative. Narratives frequently use spaces that are physically and perceptually inaccessible as sites where imagination is given rein. A good example of the ways in which imaginative space can be used by a narrative is the “Golden Country” of 1984, a space that actually shuttles between being imaginatively- and physically accessible. Winston Smith initially thinks of this as a dream space: “In this waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot track wandering across it and a molehole here and there.”22 Not long after this, Smith discovers that this seemingly imaginary space is actually quite accessible physically, as Julia gives him directions and arranges to meet him in a very similar place. The effect of this shift between imaginary and physically accessible space is important to the novel, since the government denies the existence of


such idyllic natural spaces throughout. The space becomes a vehicle by which Smith’s desire for change is shaped and strengthened. When Smith originally dreams of the Golden Country as imaginary it is linked to physical desire only in an abstract way; once he actually visits this place, he comes to recognize more strongly his own sexual desire: “In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story” (105). Here the Golden Country gives form to the desire that will drive the narrative, first as an imaginary place and then more strongly as a physical location. As this example suggests, imaginatively accessible space does not play a fundamentally different role within a narrative than physically- and perceptually accessible space. Just as perceptually accessible space can provide information to the immediate setting and shape a trajectory for narrative desire, so too can imaginative space perform these narrative functions. We might think, for example, about the way in which the search for “The City” structures the last part of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Tony Last’s ill-fated and unrealistic fondness for his traditional English estate (Hetton) becomes transformed here into a search for an imaginary place that embodies these same qualities: “He had a clear picture of it in his mind. It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton, pennons and banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent.”23 And, like these other types of accessible space, these imaginary spaces are positioned in relation to the immediate setting. It is precisely because of his impending divorce and his inability to inhabit the contemporary world that Tony projects the City and takes off in search of it; this imaginary space lifts him out of everyday life. Conditions of Access I have suggested the means by which spaces are accessible—through physical travel, through perception, or through imagination. We are probably inclined first to think of such accessibility in terms of purely physical abilities—can characters see at a certain distance? can they overcome some barrier to travel to a particular space? But we should recognize at least three different ways in which access may be allowed or denied. The first is of course physical. Bodies allow for certain types of movement, perception, and imagination. We may at first think that imagination promises to give us new access to spaces, but I would suggest that imagination still continues to work through some understanding of


the body. Typical in this sense is the geometrical allegory that we see in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, a novel that seems to create characters and spaces using the most non-corporeal “bodies” imaginable—those of two-dimensional geometrical shapes like squares, triangles, and polygons of various sizes. It is clear, however, that Abbott’s story of two-dimensional spaces and non-corporeal access is an allegory of entirely embodied relations. Thus, the number of sides that one has is equated to one’s social status, and women are always accorded only two sides as both a sign of their inferiority and a condition of their dangerousness: “If our highly pointed Triangles of the Soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our Women. For if a Soldier is a wedge, a Woman is a needle; being, so to speak, all point, at least at the two extremes. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a Female, in Flatland, is a creature by no means to be trifled with.”24 Even within fantastic narratives, magical or otherworldly travel is represented according to models drawn from everyday physical experience. Thus, for example, when J.K. Rowling describes magical travel in her popular Harry Potter children’s books, she does so by describing common physical experiences: “It felt as though he was being sucked down a giant drain. He seemed to be spinning very fast—the roaring in his ears was deafening—he tried to keep his eyes open but the whirl of green flames made him feel sick—something hard knocked his elbow and he tucked it in tightly, still spinning and spinning—now it felt as though cold hands were slapping his face—squinting through his glasses he saw a blurred stream of fireplaces and snatched glimpses of the rooms beyond. . . .”25 Magical movement here is modeled on several common physical experiences—the flushing of water, the jostling of crowds, the movement down a hall with rooms opening off to either side—rather than creating some sort of disembodied experience of travel. Indeed, for obvious reasons it is impossible for writers to integrate travel as a component of a narrative without describing it in corporeal terms. If we think of disembodied travel in narrative, the only examples that come to mind tend to involve instantaneous transfer to other locations. The spatial and temporal jumps that characterize Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five involve such movement—the change from one moment and place to the next is instantaneous and without physical cost or effect.26 Dream sequences within narratives likewise exemplify this kind of nonphysical movement, since they tend immediately to shift characters into another world without drama-tizing the movement to that imaginative place. Clearly, however, such disembodied movements


depart fundamentally from the structure of spaces that we usually think of in a narrative. Technology may expand these limits, but always within the framework provided by the body. In their study of metaphor and cognitive science, Lakoff and Johnson argue specifically that conventional bodily experience provides our ways of thinking about knowledge and access to the world: Our subjective mental life is enormous in scope and richness. We make subjective judgments about such abstract things as importance, similarity, difficulty, and morality, and we have subjective experiences of desire, affection, intimacy, and achievement. Yet, as rich as these experiences are, much of the way we conceptualize them, reason about them, and visualize them comes from other domains of experience. These other domains are mostly sensorimotor domains, as when we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience) and failing to understand an idea as having it go right by us or over our heads. The cognitive mechanism for such conceptualizations is conceptual metaphor, which allows us to use the physical logic of grasping to reason about understanding.27

While Lakoff and Johnson are speaking about abstract ideas of reasoning, they imply that any experience will be understood using metaphors drawn from traditional bodily experience. Thus, we can say that new forms of information are filtered through older models for bodily experience. Although technology may give us the ability to see further, to hear sounds inaudible to the unaided ear, to see into spaces that the human eye cannot penetrate, technologies do not give us new senses. One might argue that in creating technology that allows us to “see” X-rays that science has created a sensitivity to a range of the electromagnetic spectrum that is equivalent to discovering a new sense. And yet, we imagine this new sense through sight and ultimately depend on our eyes to make sense of this new information. Especially when we consider narratives, it is clear this new information is likely to be described using more naturally human faculties.28 Physical access is, of course, likewise always imagined through the filter of the culture’s way of thinking about the body’s abilities. Thus, although women of the time were more than capable of functioning within public life, feminist critics have noted how traditional mores saw the female body as physically unable to tolerate a life unsheltered by domestic enclosure. In many ways, these cultural mores are the counterpart to the kinds of technological enhancement that come to mind


when we think about physical access to space. Although technology may give us access to new spaces through some new perceptual or physical device, that access will necessarily be understood through the culture’s model of the body. A good example of this is the way in which space travel is imagined in Science Fiction. Most of this writing imagines some sort of travel beyond the speed of light—a necessity if these stories are to link together planets and stars from distant solar systems. Although such a means of travel raises huge problems in our understanding of time and space, often the act of travel itself is imagined very much in traditional physical terms: characters get into a spaceship, it takes off and travels for a certain period of time, and then arrives at another place after a consistent interval. Here, the (imagined) technology that gives access to spaces otherwise too distant to be visited is nonetheless imagined through the particular cultural ideas of the human body and travel. Thus we can say that the culture will imagine the physical abilities of the body in particular ways depending as much on its beliefs and values as on its actual knowledge of the science of the body. Although we think first about access to space through physical constraints, these examples suggest that cultural convention and the social imaginary are equally as important. We can take this a step further and recognize that there are times when access to spaces is directly limited and shaped by convention. In discussing narrative frames, in fact, Ronen notes that frames will frequently have a conventional quality. She sees this specifically as a matter of certain types of generalized spaces to be contrasted to unique situations: “Every place is associated in our encyclopedic knowledge with other entities. Such networks of stored information are termed in text-theories Frames (with a capital letter to avoid confusion with a frame as a spatial construct). A Frame is a data structure for representing a stereotyped situation, a representation of knowledge about the world as chunks or units of concepts denoting certain courses of events or actions involving several objects, persons, properties, relations or facts, a place, etc.” (432). Ronen is certainly right in noting that some situations are strongly conventional and in calling to mind a certain standard set of spatial frames and possibilities. We should also recognize, however, that social convention also plays a role in defining spatial access even when those spaces are not strictly stereotypical. This is easiest to see when convention disallows physical movement to a space. Much of the effectiveness of Fanny Burney’s Evelina, for example, depends on her very sensitive understanding of the way in which convention can exert nearly physical limitations upon women. Throughout the novel Evelina is pursued by the immoral but socially savvy Sir Clement


Willoughby, who is able to manipulate the rules of polite society to force Evelina into compromising situations. A good example occurs early in the novel where Evelina finds herself forced to accept an unwanted invitation to ride in Willoughby’s carriage. Evelina finds herself trapped through conventional rules that she experiences very much as physical restraints: I now began to apprehend that he had himself ordered the man to go a wrong way; and I was so much alarmed at the idea, that, the very instant it occurred to me, I let down the glass, and made a sudden effort to open the chariot-door myself, with a view of jumping into the street; but he caught hold of me, exclaiming, “For Heaven’s sake, what is the matter?” “I—I don’t know,” cried I (quite out of breath), “but I am sure the man goes wrong; and if you will not speak to him, I am determined I will get out myself.” “You amaze me,” answered he (still holding me), “I cannot imagine what you apprehend. Sure you can have no doubts of my honor?” He drew me towards him as he spoke. I was frightened dreadfully, and could hardly say, “No, Sir, no,—none at all: only Mrs. Mirvan, I think she will be uneasy.”29

This passage captures the way that Willoughby is able to use the expectations of polite society—one does not jump from carriages, one does not impute scandalous intentions to gentlemen—to exert physical restraint on Evelina. Convention here limits physical movement. There is, in this sense, a conventional component to any situation, since every situation makes reference to social beliefs about action and knowledge. Such components do not make Ronen’s distinction between stereotyped and unique situation invalid, but they do suggest that unique situations are such only in very relative ways; the vast majority of what makes these situations meaningful is that they conform to our beliefs about action, knowledge, and movement. To physical and conventional conditions for spatial access, we should add metaphysical considerations. When K. struggles to use Barnabas as a messenger to the Castle, he is not simply running into strictly physical limitations, but instead cannot push past barriers once dismissed. Barnabas could move into the Castle, but is blocked by other than physical reasons. Here convention is certainly an element of the inaccessibility of these spaces—Barnabas has no conventional reason to be beyond the barriers, and hence cannot imagine pushing beyond them. But more important, it seems to me, are the metaphysical concerns at work within this passage. As I quoted earlier, “[t]here are barriers even at the entrance


to the rooms where he’s admitted, so you see there are barriers he can pass, and they’re just the same as the ones he’s never yet passed, which looks as if one ought not to suppose that behind the ultimate barriers the offices are any different from those Barnabas has already seen.” Here, the very idea of a barrier seems to come into doubt in Kafka’s novel, leaving Barnabas and especially K. unable to penetrate into the Castle not because of physical or conventional ideas—indeed, K. challenges both these at different points in the novel—but because of the very metaphysical paradoxes that seem to be at work within this space. These metaphysical concerns are, of course, especially evident in works with a strong philosophical or religious component. Dante’s treatment of paradise in The Divine Comedy clearly instances such metaphysical conditions for access to certain types of space. The later parts of Paradiso are concerned with the conditions of Dante’s worthiness to look upon the angels (Canto XXX) and, eventually, God (Canto XXXIII). St. Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary on Dante’s behalf: This man, who witnessed from the deepest pit Of all the universe, up to this height, The souls’ lives one by one, doth now entreat That thou, by grace, may grant to him such might That higher yet in vision he may rise Towards the final source of bliss and light. And I who never burned for my own eyes More than I burn for his, with all my prayers Now pray to thee, and pray they may suffice, That of all mortal clouding which impairs, Thine own prayers may posses the power to clean His sight, till in the highest bliss it shares.30

Although this passage suggests that Dante’s natural inability to glance upon these spiritual scenes has some physical basis (a “clouding” of his vision), it is clear that ultimately Dante needs help to achieve this vision precisely because of his mortality. This perceptual space, in other words, is inaccessible to him for metaphysical reasons. We can say, then, that all narratives organize spatial access by defining some spaces as inaccessible, by creating an economy between physical, perceptual, and imaginative access, and by organizing this access through physical, conventional, or metaphysical terms. We might summarize this typology by applying it to a novel that I already discussed in spatial terms in chapter—Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. The novel shapes its space by excluding nearly everything except the


Ramsay’s mainland home, the nearby town, the university, and the lighthouse. Although the middle section does make reference to the larger political context of World War I, these are literally bracketed off from the main action of the narrative: “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous].”31 Such bracketed passages draw our attention back to the limited setting of the main part of the narrative, making clear that the narrative sees this larger context as irreconcilable to the spatial logic of the novel. This limited spatial scope depends on the dynamic tension between the mainland and the lighthouse. Although secondary masculine spaces like the University are allowed to hover on the fringes of the novel in order to define some of the characters, it is important that a larger world of social possibilities is not allowed to enter the novel, since precisely the sort of spatial limitation is how Woolf achieves her focus on the moral power of Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay is quite literally the essential element of the novel, since she provides the balance point for Lily Briscoe’s painting that summarizes the novel. Lily remarks that the whole scene on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs. Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters. . . . But what a power was in the human soul! she thought. That woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite . . . something—this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years complete. (239–40)

This formal understanding of space as balanced between a number of individuals unified by the central image of Mrs. Ramsay runs throughout the novel. Because this strictly circumscribed space is organized around contrasting locations, the novel is in many ways an encyclopedia of the types of access relations that we have discussed in this section. Within this general scheme of accessible and inaccessible spaces, Woolf creates a tension between (in turn) imaginative, perceptual, and physical access to the lighthouse. The characters move from imagining a trip to the lighthouse in the first part of the novel (especially Mrs. Ramsay and James) to visually studying it in the second half (especially Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe) and finally physically traveling to it (James, Cam, and Mr. Ramsay). In the process, Woolf shuffles between the various characters and their means of access to distant spaces, and


studying how characters change as they access these spaces in different ways. Convention mixes with physical limits as Mr. Ramsay denies James’s initial trip because of bad weather, and both give way to the metaphysical qualities that Lily associates with the attempt to paint the scene without the unifying image of Mrs. Ramsay, an attempt that is completed only with the bold and abstract movement of drawing “a line there, in the center” (310) that connects these “blurred” elements. Throughout the novel, we can say, what animates the forward movement of the plot is precisely the struggle to investigate our access to other places, the tension between many types of space and the ways that we can travel to them. Because the novel struggles with the philosophical basis of our knowledge of the world and our means of acting upon it, Woolf naturally moves us through these various types of space as if struggling to balance the types of movement that we have available to us. Narrative Circulation I have suggested, then, that narrative space must be understood in terms of the types of movements that it allows, and that studying these spaces merely as a matter of the “atmosphere” or the “symbolism” that they provide misses the ultimately narrative basis for these spaces. Space, I have argued, becomes narrative when it is animated by movement. In turn, narrative desire is shaped by the way in which it is deployed as a cause of these movements. Evelyn Birge Vitz, whose discussion of medieval narrative I drew on a great deal in chapter 1, discusses the relationship between space and desire. Her contrast between modern and medieval ways of organizing desire suggests the context and limits of the model that I have offered here: In the traditional modern tale . . . the Subject goes “out there,” acts, and then “brings back” the “outside,” at least by returning and telling the story. But in this work [Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose] such terms must, all along the line, be reversed. Not only does the lover not constitute the “inside”: he is ever outside, trying to get in. Moreover, far from wanting to “bring back that outside,” this lover asks nothing better than to remain in Love’s garden, to serve Love and to be near the rose. And since this garden reflects a state of mind, the lover/narrator (unlike Gulliver in Lilliput, for example) need not leave it in order to bring it to us. In fact, rather than bringing it to us, the narrator’s efforts go to leading us to it.32

Vitz argues that medieval narrative understands the position of the narrator in a very different way than modern narrative. While Vitz


confirms that desire is organized by space even in medieval narrative, she makes clear that the focus on travel is inherently connected to our modern ways of thinking about narrative. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the corporeal narratology that I have developed depends on the modern body, which is at the base of contemporary ways of thinking about narrative. Such a radical departure from current thinking about narrative space and setting obviously has implications for other aspects of modern narrative. If embodied narrative space means that settings will always be sites of motion rather than static places with symbolic value, then narrative will always be in motion. Such motion will become the basis of narrative itself. In an earlier chapter I noted Didier Coste’s definition of narrative: “An act of communication is narrative whenever and only when imparting a transitive view of the world is the effect of the message produced.”33 This definition is merely a concise and direct statement of a narratological tradition of associating narrative and temporal change. My discussion in this chapter has suggested that in addition to temporal change, that narrative also necessarily involves the representation of spatial change—either as an actual movement, or as an imagined or hoped-for movement. A text that is spatially static is no more a narrative than a text in which nothing changes. It is in this sense, I think, that we can read Darko Suvin’s observation about the importance of spatiotemporal setting in distinguishing narrative and metaphor. Considering border cases like the parable (“The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed . . .”), Suvin argues that “The vehicle of this parable is a minimal story involving precise space and time, whose characteristic is the deployment of hyperbole and paradox by which the least shall become the greatest given some preconditions.”34 According to Suvin, a metaphor becomes a parable and thus a narrative only when it is located within a specific space and time: Now, whereas in a metaphor like “The chairman plowed through the discussion” there is certainly an action (the metaphoric focus is a verb), a micro-metaphor or a sentence-metaphor cannot, I would maintain until proof to the contrary, envisage a sequential change of state, a succession of events tied to a chronotope that accommodates ups and downs, as stipulated by Bakhtin. (61)

Suvin goes on from here to conclude that “It is, therefore, not action (by a narrative agent such as the plowing chairman) which differentiates story from metaphor; it is the development of space and time, from seed to field to tree and from sowing through growing time, which adds story


to metaphor and forms the parable” (61). Suvin suggests that discourse only becomes narrative when it is located within a specific place. My discussion of space in this chapter has suggested how important space will be in helping to make action and temporal change narrative. In turn, I have suggested throughout that this link between change and place can be traced back to the body.35 If narrative always involves movement between settings, this helps to account for the fundamental importance of the theme of circulation within so much recent work on the body in literature and culture. In particular, circulation emerges as a figure when theories of social space encounter representational problems. One of the best known of these recent discussions of social circulation is Catherine Gallagher’s treatment of nineteenth-century social theory. Gallagher discusses Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population (1798) and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861), focusing on the links between individual and collective bodies. For traditional social and political thinking, individual healthy bodies signal the health of the state as a whole. With Malthus’s essay, this principle is drawn into question precisely by “tracing social problems to human vitality itself.”36 Specifically, Malthus is interested in the way that human reproduction can lead to overpopulation and to general human misery. As Gallagher writes, “The healthy, and consequently reproducing, body thus is the harbinger of the disordered society full of starving bodies” (85). By shattering the homology between individual bodies and the population in general, Malthus defines the human body as a special object around which any economy must be organized: “Completely untranscendable, the body is thus absolutely problematic. For a body that could and should be overcome would provide its own means of the displacement from the center of social discourse. Absolute problematization, thus, relies on complete valorization” (90). This observation is important for Gallagher’s analysis and especially relevant to our discussion of social circulation because it suggests that the body raises a representational problem within this scheme. The struggle to find a way to describe the body is the struggle to transcend it. The untranscendable body appears as an especially important issue in Henry Mayhew’s work, where it becomes the occasion for a theory of social circulation. Mayhew addresses the issue of individual bodies within the larger social system precisely by focusing on figures of circulation within the social space. He distinguishes between the productive bodies of workers and the bodies of those who circulate within the social space, buying and selling goods. In the process, these circulating bodies become strong without being productive. Thus, Gallagher argues,


Mayhew brings out a contrast that is the basis of Malthus’s theory (91), and the central paradox that Gallagher is interested in. Mayhew’s and Malthus’s reasoning can be traced back to an ambivalence about the concept of exchange. Both are interested in being able to trace value back to human bodies, rather than to more traditional ideas of exchange value. For them, “the only stock whose increase is truly destined for the maintenance of labor is the stock of working-class food, that which can be converted most directly and immediately into working-class bodies” (95). To distinguish between real productive value and the mere apparent value produced by scarcity is to provide an account of what will make a society thrive. Problems immediately arise, however, in this radically concrete theory of value, since it is ultimately circular: “The body that labours is valuable insofar as its commodity can almost immediately be turned back into not just a body but another valuable body, that is, another body producing food. In other words, the value of bodies is not absolute but is rather based on their ability to create a commodity whose value is only defined by relationship to its ability to replenish the body” (96). Such a theory of value ultimately leaves nothing at the basis of the economy except the circulation between valuable bodies. It is in this sense that circulation arises as an important figure in these theories. Mayhew is critical of the costermonger, the ideal figure of social circulation and the bloated strong but unvaluable body, for very ambiguous reasons: “The Irish women costermongers are a case in point. They are chaste, devout, and hardworking; Mayhew can find no morally deleterious effects of street selling on their characters” (101). Gallagher goes on, then, to ask “in what does [this profession’s] viciousness consist?” and explains: “As she stands there innocently selling strawberries, she is a visible and audible emblem of the sexual and economic exploitation that goes on behind doors and that has driven her into the street. If the costermongers as a group are guilty of anything in Mayhew’s book, they are guilty of embodying and hence raising to the surface of consciousness a ruthless struggle for marketplace advantage that Mayhew thinks is going on everywhere unseen” (101). In locating the circulating costermonger as a figure embodying the whole social system, Gallagher suggests that she comes in for a critique by Mayhew as a representative of the problems of corporeality that haunt both his and Malthus’s social theories. Circulation here points to the impossibility of providing a simple homology between individual and society, and of thus describing a simple emblem of the society as a whole. Circulation works, in other words, precisely against the type of all-encompassing body politic image that we associate with social discourse.


The association here between circulation and the difficulty of representing the whole of a society or the whole of social space has appeared regularly within the type of new historical criticism that Gallagher exemplifies. Jonathan Gil Harris has observed a similar ambiguity in the representation of “conduits” and sources in Tudor and Stuart descriptions of the body politic. Like Gallagher’s nineteenth-century sociology, the texts that Harris treats focus on the conflict between individual and social bodies: “As the 1544 law governing water supply testifies, the civic corpus politicus was now capable of finding itself at odds with private ‘body politics,’ property owners who . . . were ostensibly part of, but were also guaranteed a relative autonomy from, the larger social body.”37 And like Gallagher, Harris sees this tension being played out through a fundamentally ambiguous understanding of social space. This discourse seeks to locate the source of London’s water within the city itself through the metaphor of the human body: “In anthropomorphizing London’s water supply, [Samuel] Rolle likewise pinpoints an origin within the body of the city: just as the liver and the spleen are ‘fountains of blood,’ the mainsprings of the city water supply are its ‘several conduits’” (207). This image of total social space immediately reveals representational ambiguities, since the word conduit can mean both source and circulation: “When indebted to an external source, the city’s water supply involves a blurring of geosymbolic boundaries: elements of the ‘outside’ are incorporated in the ‘inside’” (208). Harris ultimately traces these representational ambiguities back to ways of thinking about gender and reproduction, but especially significant in the light of Gallagher’s essay is the way in which the circulation of the conduit comes to emblemize the problems of representing the whole social space. Other critics have likewise drawn on the image of circulation for a similar purpose.38 What does the relation between circulation and the difficulty of representing social space mean for a theory of narrative? These discussions suggest that circulation is fundamentally at odds with our traditional ways of representing society as static. We can say that the urge to narrate may arise from the recognition that these spaces cannot be treated simply or represented directly. In The Magic Mountain, a novel fundamentally interested in space and narrative, Thomas Mann describes “the condition of life as of narration” as follows: “that we can never see the whole picture at once—unless we propose to throw overboard all the God-conditioned forms of human knowledge.”39 In associating narrative with the attempt to represent something which cannot otherwise be given a shape, Mann points us toward an appreciation of the kind of kinetic spaces that I have described in this chapter. If narrative is ultimately concerned in a


fundamental way with the movement between spaces, it may be not only because of the importance of these movements to the representation of desire, but also because these movements are a way to grasp something which otherwise would not be able to be represented. At the end of chapter 2, I noted that the body ultimately functions as a component of textual hermeneutics, representing the complex relationship between author, text, and reader. The general body that I characterized using Beloved shuttled between these components of reading. We see the same movement at work in narrative space, where the body becomes a figure of circulation when we become aware of the representational complexities that it bridges. The Aesthetics of Kinetic Space This chapter has suggested, then, an essential link between narrative and the kinds of spatiotemporal movements that I have traced back to the body. By understanding the representational problems raised by the body, I have argued, we can see why space and temporal change are so essential to turning a text into narrative. Before concluding this chapter, let me push these observations one step further and link this type of spatiotemporal change to what we can describe as the aesthetics of narrative. I would like to turn to an aesthetician who has tried to describe the kind of kinetic approach to space that I have struggled toward in this chapter. When Susanne Langer develops her theory of art, central is the idea of a “virtual space” that an artwork creates around itself. Indeed, for her space is the essence of artistic form: Virtual space, being entirely independent and not a local area in actual space, is a self-contained, total system. Whether it be two-dimensional or three, it is continuous in all its possible directions, and infinitely plastic. In any work of art, the dimensionality of its space and the continuous character of it are always implicitly assured. Perceptual forms are carved out of it and must appear to be still related to it despite their most definite boundaries.40

For Langer, an artwork provides a perspective from which to view its objects in a sense probably clearest in the inevitable manipulation of view in realist painting. But for Langer, this perspective becomes the essence of the artwork by transcending the specifics of this perspective to become a whole idea of space that encompasses the artwork. This is why, for Langer, decorative arts remain essentially aesthetic for her; although they have no realistic perspective, they manipulate space.


As she writes, “The immediate effect of good decoration is to make the surface, somehow, more visible” (61). Langer’s discussion of virtual space is richest in her treatment of sculpture. The idea of virtual space allows Langer to distinguish the literal space of the artwork considered from a realist perspective from the way that a sculpture occupies space: The volume, however, is not a cubic measure, like the space in a box. It is more than the bulk of the figure; it is a space made visible, and is more than the area which the figure actually occupies. The tangible form has a complement of empty space that it absolutely commands, that is given with it and only with it, and is, in fact, part of the sculptural volume. The figure itself seems to have a sort of continuity with the emptiness around it, however much its solid masses may assert themselves as such. The void enfolds it, and the enfolding space has vital form as a continuation of the figure. (88)

Where we might initially expect to treat the space of a sculpture as a fairly routine matter of understanding the scene or figure being staged and how it is placed within the perspectives available to viewers, Langer describes a space that interacts within the surrounding emptiness to present an abstract scheme or motif of mass and void. Langer’s treatment of sculpture as the signature artform of her theory of virtual space becomes particularly interesting when we note that movement is particularly relevant to this form. Langer describes what she calls “virtual kinetic volume” as a reflection of life’s natural teleology: “Only life, once put in motion, achieves certain forms inevitably, as long as it goes on at all: the acorn becomes an oak, however stunted or varied, the sparrow’s egg a sparrow, the maggot a fly” (89). For Langer, sculpture seeks to achieve this kinetic space, not necessarily by representing living things, but by capturing the “living form” of even inanimate objects: “Where that feeling is really conveyed, we have the semblance of ‘inevitable,’ ‘necessary,’ ‘inviolable’ form before our eyes, organizing the space it fills and also the space that seems to touch it and be necessary to its appearance” (89). Langer’s suggestion here that objects like “baskets and birdcages” can be represented kinetically may initially seem surprising, since they do not seem to be the “expression of biological feeling.” But when Langer goes on to write about sculpture specifically, the logic behind this claim becomes clearer. She notes that “[s]culpture creates an equally visual space, but not a space of direct vision; for volume is really given originally to touch, both haptic touch and contact limiting bodily movement, and the business of sculpture is to translate its data into entirely visual terms, that is, to make tactual space visible” (89–90). What


Langer is suggesting here is that inanimate objects come to express “biological feeling” by being linked to human feelings—either though everyday use and human life-rhythms, or by the physical interaction of object and viewer. Although Langer’s theory may seem merely to repeat traditional notions of organic form inconsistent with the representational conflicts that I have described throughout this chapter, in linking kinetic space to physical movement Langer provides a way of thinking about corporeal narrative space. Langer herself explicitly associates sculpture with the manipulation of bodily space: Sculptural form is a powerful abstraction from actual objects and the three-dimensional space which we construe by means of them, through touch and sight. It makes its own construction in three dimensions, namely the semblance of kinetic space. Just as one’s field of direct vision is organized, in actuality, as a plane at the distance of a natural focus, so the kinetic realm of tangible volumes, or things, and free air spaces between them, is organized in each person’s actual experience as his environment, i.e. a space whereof he is the center; his body and the range of its free motion, its breathing space and the reach of its limbs, are his own kinetic volume, the point of orientation from which he plots the world of tangible reality—objects, distances, motions, shape and size and mass. (90)

For Langer, sculpture expresses kinetic form by virtue of the lived space in which it is viewed. Such works are kinetic in this sense not only because they are linked to natural teleology, but also because the space in which they are viewed itself involves movement. As Langer says, tangible realistic space involves distance and motion, among other qualities. Sculpture will use this kinetic space to integrate the space that the viewer occupies into its own style of representation. Although our interaction with an everyday object may well be kinetic to the extent that it participates in some small way in the teleology of our everyday life, art will make this space and the relationship between object and user into the basis upon which the artistic space of representation will be constructed. The kinetic space of our life’s teleology becomes mirrored in the movement of the human body around the sculpture. Movement, then, is essential for aesthetics according to Langer. In suggesting that sculpture constructs a kinetic space that is the basis of its aesthetic form, Langer provides a way of accounting for the corporeal power of narrative that I have been developing in this chapter. Narrative and sculpture have a great deal in common, viewed from the perspective of Langer’s theory. Both involve movement and teleology as


the essence of their artistic form. In sculpture, this is the motion of the viewer around the object; in narrative, it is the motion of the characters within the story. In both cases, too, this motion may well be limited and remain largely virtual. A sculpture, particularly as part of a larger installation, may strongly limit the perspective from which it can be viewed; a narrative likewise may tell the story of a character who precisely cannot move, cannot travel beyond the space of a prison cell or infirmary bed. But in both cases the expectation of movement animates the text and shapes our experience of the work. Langer suggests that the kinetic quality of this space is essential to the work’s form, that without this real or virtual motion we would not experience the text in a way that reveals the represented objects’ place within life. This applies particularly well to narrative, where we have seen that the motion of characters is essential to the kinds of space that we experience as we read. And, perhaps most importantly, Langer suggests that the kind of space that we find in a narrative will necessarily be kinetic, and that rather than ignoring this motion for the sake of defining fixed scenes or locations, that we should emphasize the motion between those spaces as an essential part of our experience of the work. In narrative, as in sculpture, the basis of the motion within virtual space is the human body, the object that does not allow location to be static. It is precisely because we move around a sculpture that it is not a painting, that we are embodied rather than fixed in a location. Likewise, it is because characters are always somewhere physically in a narrative, always positioned in a way that they are able to anticipate types of possible movement and able to use different sorts of perceptual information, that narrative space can never be static. That critics have largely failed to recognize this kinetic basis for narrative space is the natural result of failing to give sufficient attention to the corporeal nature of narrative characters. With attention to the body within this space, our narrative theories are fundamentally changed.

CHAPTER 5 Embodiment and Lightness in Narration

Narratologists and cultural critics will agree that narration inherently creates and depends on authority, but discuss that authority in very different ways. According to classical narratology, narrators are constantly seeking to affirm their trustworthiness, their authority to tell the story at hand. One of the principle games that authors play with readers—indeed, perhaps the principle of “play” inherent in all narrative as understood by narratology and the crucial variable within the narrative text—is the tension between the information given to a reader and the degree to which readers should accept or distrust that information. On the basis of this narratological question hangs the whole structure of narrators, narratees, implied authors, and implied readers that account for much of practical narratological interpretation and debate. It is a formal question introduced at the very outset of modern narratology by Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and one that continues to dominate discourse on narrative form. In this sense, individual narratives can be seen as rhetorically manipulating readerly trust for some individual textual end. Cultural critics have many of the same interests in narrative and authority, but have approached the relationship in a very different way. Postcolonial critics in particular have explored the relationship between narrative and various types of national authority, noting that our modern ideas of nation and the types of postmedieval forms of authority arose at about the same time that the novel became a popular form of discourse. Narration in this sense is an alternative to older forms of authority that nonetheless participates in the same cultural logic that seeks a definition of social unity and history through art. As Homi Bhabha remarks in his introduction to the influential collection of essays, Nation and Narration, “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s


eye. Such an image of the nation—or narration—might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.”1 The modern nation, as Benedict Anderson has taught us, is an imagined community, and thus is always the result of certain forms of historical narrative and discursive construction.2 The authority to narrate, consequently, is dependent on a deeper and more complex understanding of national origins and political history. What is remarkable about the persistent interest in authority in both narratology and cultural criticism is that the link between these two ways of studying narrative has not been explored. In particular, narratology has largely ignored the larger question of the constitution of narrative authority within its cultural context. This is not just to suggest that the ways that a narrator might establish authority to speak or might foster trust will vary from culture to culture—this is obviously the case, and narratologists have been very sensitive to these sorts of protocols. Instead, what I am interested in here is the way that the very question of narrative authority is a modern one created by the rise of narrative as a new way to establish social order. Throughout this study I have suggested that our ways of thinking about narrative reflect the particular conditions of postmedieval, usually novelistic thinking. Authority, I would like to suggest, likewise is conditioned by print culture and the ways in which print encourages us to think about the body in the experience of reading and the construction of the text. Once we begin to recognize the corporeal issues implicit in our modern ways of thinking about narrative authority, we will see that this authority is intimately entwined with the problems of narrative circulation that I have spelled out in chapter 4. Ultimately, I will argue here, narrative authority is about corporeal positioning, and this position is always a matter of the transformation of the “weightiness” of reader, author, and text. Authority and Embodiment The nature of narrative authority changed with the advent of print culture and the conditions of modern narrative construction that I discussed in chapter 1. This is a point that Walter Benjamin makes in his essay, “The Storyteller,” when he distinguishes between the tradition of the oral storyteller and modern written narrative: “The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel

embodiment and lightness in narration / 151

from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is the essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing.”3 Of particular interest to us is the way that these two forms establish their authority, according to Benjamin. Although storytelling draws on personal experience, it is ultimately tradition and memory that give the storyteller authority: “Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. In the first place among these is the one practice by the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form in the end. One ties on the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the Oriental ones, have always readily shown” (98). Benjamin describes the appeal and authority of the novel in contrasting terms: A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader. (For even the reader of a poem is ready to utter the words, for the benefit of the listener.) In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as a fire devours logs in the fireplace. The suspense which permeates the novel is very much like the draft which stimulates the flame in the fireplace and enlivens its play. (100)

Because of the isolation of the reader, Benjamin associates the novel, like the story, with death—but in a very different way. In the novel, death is not the referent of the narrative, but rather the fuel consumed by the reader: “The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about” (101). The novel here makes no reference to history and promises no shared experience of reader and speaker; instead, the authority of the writing and its power comes entirely from the solitude of reading. Although some critics have tried to trace the modern novelistic tradition back to ancient texts,4 most critics have recognized that the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century brings with it the questions about authority that so many critics have associated with narrative interpretation.5 Michael McKeon makes precisely this point in The Origins of


the English Novel, where he suggests that the transition from an oral to a literate culture brings with it a transformation in the conditions of textual authority: “Because they admit of none of the independent tests of verification on which our ideas of historical authority depend, the authoritative linearity of oral lineages is deceptive. . . . Writing [conversely] ‘reifies’ memory. The physical preservation of knowledge produces not only documents and archives but also the conditions for the ‘objective’ comparison of data, even the inclination to regard knowledge as a collection of discrete ‘objects.’”6 If authority is an issue in an oral tale, McKeon suggests, that issue is most likely to occur at the level of utterance itself— in the situation of the recitation of the story—rather than be imbedded into the text itself. Written narrative, in this sense, is marked by the inherent problems of objectivity in two different senses. First, narrative is challenged to establish its reliability through mimesis and truthfulness, rather than by appeal to tradition. Second and consequently, narrative must work harder to present its topic as an object, as a thing to be studied, moved around, and made visible. Narratives in this sense must describe their subject in almost physical terms, presenting characters and objects in a clear light. This contrast between an older style of storytelling based on tradition and a modern narrative’s need to be explicit and to make its objects visible is clear in Auerbach’s Mimesis. Auerbach, we will recall, begins his landmark study by distinguishing the mimetic style of the Odyssey, which insists on explaining the background of all narrative events and characters, and that of the Old Testament story of the sacrifice of Isaac, which allows a tremendous number of questions to go unanswered: The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of historical becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.7

One contrast suggested in this passage is particularly helpful for distinguishing between older and newer styles of narrative. In the Biblical text, Auerbach makes clear, one of the things that allows so much information to remain in the background and allows for such confident focus on certain events is the belief in the precedence of an otherworldly


illumination of this world and the narratives about it: “Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it [the Biblical narrative] seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history” (12). The Biblical narrative, in other words, claims an authority for its telling that Homer achieves only by clarity and fullness of exposition. The Biblical narrative presupposes an authority that Homer must construct through stylistic choices and the visibility of his narrative objects. Although McKeon suggests that the authority that Homer claims is further weakened as we move into the modern novel, the distinction is a helpful one in delimiting the problem that we will discuss in this chapter. Modern narratives, we can say, hope to construct their own authority through their style of writing. Older narratives will frequently be freed from this demand. In this sense, many narratives that claim for themselves a particularly strong form of authority that is not granted through the rhetorical choices of the writer but rather through the quality of his or her vision or inspiration will largely escape from the narrative issues that I will discuss in this chapter. Benjamin has made this association directly when he noted that storytelling, in contrast to modern novels, depends on reference to memory; traditional stories in this sense point beyond themselves for authority, which modern narratives must construct for themselves. According to Auerbach, what marks Homeric narrative is a certain narrational participation within the world of the text. That is, Homer seeks to unpack all events and characters and to make them visible. To do so is to assume that there is a position within the world of the story from which we can literally see the events clearly. Precisely the opposite is the case in the Biblical narrative according to Auerbach, since such narratives already assume that readers will translate the actual facts of the story out of the world in which they occur and into an allegorical context. In this sense, the Homeric narrative has a distinctly modern quality precisely because it insists on offering a narrative perspective from which to see the events and does not presuppose an otherworldly relation to the concrete existence of the characters. Modern narratives, we can say, are concerned with visibility and defining a position from which to view the objects that they represent. We have seen precisely this issue of the position from which we should view an object, appear in the discussion of circulation at the end of chapter 4. Print culture will extend the concerns that we can recognize in the Odyssey, since not only does modern narrative lack the overarching authority assumed by Biblical narrative, but it worries over its own status as an object. For this


reason, postmedieval narratives will need to make their objects visible like Homeric narrative, but will also be more concerned about the position from which the author constructs and the reader receives this visibility As writers of modern narrative seek to define a position from which to view their subject, then, they will struggle with the “object-ness” of the thing that they describe. If the world must be made visible—rather than assuming that its meaning will become clear through tradition or revelation—then we must find some way to position ourselves in relation to that object and to make its meaning visible upon its surface. Critics of the early British novel have, in fact, noted that precisely this issue of objects and narrational position dominates attempts to explain the nature and effect of narrative. Deidre Lynch’s recent book on the eighteenth-century British understanding of literary “character” suggests how this new relation between text and audience manifests itself in practical problems of writing, evaluation, and interpretation. Lynch’s text discusses the “curiously embodied terms in which literate people conceptualized their reading matter.”8 She notes especially that while modern popular definitions of good character focus on “roundness” and complexity, the eighteenth century focused specifically on the way that a character became “legible” through an economy of markings. This leads to a general elision of character and countenance: “each is supposed to be the very epitome of legibility and . . . this legibility is a function of incarnation” (31). In this sense, literary reading is simply another version of reading a face: Whatever else they are doing in fleshing out their characters, the figures we credit for the rise of the novel are also registering their culture’s investment in the eloquence of the material surface—the fact of the page, the outside of the body—and their culture’s idealization of what was graphically self-evident. Eighteenth-century culture, we should remember, made person both a word for someone’s physical appearance and a word for someone. It made trait signify a minimum unit of the stuff of personality, one of the identifying marks that set persons apart, and it made trait cognate with words such as stroke or line—words for the graphic elements from which both pictorial and written representations are composed and through which they are identified. (38)

Lynch makes clear in this passage that literary character is imaged through markings because of a whole cultural episteme that imagined bodies as legible in particular ways. This, however, should not dissuade us from linking such characteristic markings and the rise of print culture, since Lynch makes clear throughout that this issue arises within


the culture of the time in part because of the rise of mass printing. Thus, although Garrick’s heavily embodied acting style comes to be associated with Hogarth’s caricatures and thus a subject of debate about what constitutes too many distinctive marks, that critique arises in the context of a print culture where “the disembodiment of pleasures of the reading man or woman were beginning to be pitted against the visceral pleasures of crowd entertainment” (72). Although Lynch does not make the point explicitly, there is good reason to believe that the general cultural model of characters that she is investigating arises in significant part from the “objectness” of the written or printed account of persons that McKeon associates with the rise of literate culture. To see a text as a thing is to be challenged to adopt a position for viewing it; we have seen throughout that no simple position is possible because of the nature of narrative circulation itself. We can read the history of characterization as a series of responses to this problem of textual position and objects. As Lynch makes clear, the essential means by which physicality is imagined and worked through in the eighteenth century is by associating the printed text with a face. The bodies within texts thus become a means of negotiating the legibility of the textual artifact—both in terms of the philosophy of reading that it suggests, and through the opportunities that it allows for writers to manipulate reading through the characters that they describe. Lynch provides an example of the manipulation of character embodiment in Fielding’s and Smollett’s novels that suggests the links between this particular image of the marked body and the central issues of narrative authority that McKeon suggested at the outset. Lynch notes a fact familiar to most readers of eighteenth-century comic narrative—that frequently there is a strong distinction between heavily embodied peripheral or supporting characters, and relatively disembodied main characters: The bodily sign for the universal conversation that makes the protagonist a gentleman (nobody particular, that is, but at the same time an acceptable representative for everybody) is his bland handsomeness. The gentleman boasts the classically regular features that belong, as Reynolds proposed of the beautiful because generalized form, to nobody and everybody. . . . Those he encounters are, by contrast, emphatically embodied. Their persons assail Vitruvian ideas of human proportion or assign them to fixed places in the physiognomist’s tables: the uncouth, one-eyed, onelegged body of Peregrine Pickle’s uncle Trunnion seems, for instance, to have metamorphosed into a mute and immobilized effigy of itself, so that it is a real question “whether that was the commodore himself, or the wooden lion that used to stand at his gate.”9


This distinction between embodied and disembodied characters can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Catherine Gallagher has suggested that the full development of a genuine “nobody” to narrate novels is essential to the cultural acceptance of fiction: Nobody was the pivot point around which a massive reorientation of textual referentiality took place, and the location of this pivot was the mideighteenth-century novel. Far from being the descendant of older overtly fictional forms, the novel was the first to articulate the idea of fiction for the culture as a whole. I realized that what Ian Watt called “formal realism” was not a way of trying to hide or disguise fictionality; realism was, rather, understood to be fiction’s formal sign. Eighteenth-century readers identified with characters in novels because of the characters’ fictiveness and not in spite of it.10

This distinction clearly suggests a struggle with the perspective from which the story must be told and received. It is precisely the tension that McKeon suggests as typical of literate culture, since the authority of the teller is at issue. If, as Lynch has suggested, characters are to be known by their physical marks, how are we to know the person doing these descriptions themselves? As Lynch and Gallagher suggest, it is the function of the heavy embodiment of peripheral characters that deflects attention from this difficult epistemological question. More specifically we can say that this technique of differential embodiment practiced in eighteenth-century comic novels is a narrative strategy for creating authority for the representations presented to the reader. This strategy is necessitated by the conditions of print culture and the anxieties about the “objectivity” of the written account that comes with it. I am suggesting here, then, a rather peculiar way of studying narrative authority—in large part because I think that we have imagined the construction of authority in far too narrow terms in the past. Lynch makes clear that narratives negotiate tensions within culture implicitly through the way that they manipulate character embodiment rather than by making explicit claims to be trustworthy. Furthermore, I am suggesting a very loosely causal relationship between these textual features and the problem of textual “objectivity” in eighteenth-century culture. There is no reason, necessarily, that creating a disembodied central character will obviate the issue of the perspective from which the story is being told and how we are to understand the physical marks presented in the story. But in creating authority for the central character at the expense of embodied character “objects” that surround him, these novelists do manage to present an image of authority that has implications for their


own role as author within the narrative. A number of critics have recognized that narratives can distinguish between a disembodied position and corporealized objects of study. Teresa de Lauretis, for example, has argued that film routinely uses the female body as an object of seeing, making it “the production of a drama of vision, a memory spectacle, an image of woman as beauty—desired and untouchable, desired as remembered.”11 De Lauretis reminds us, among other things, that gender and race will be elements used to produce our sense that certain characters are embodied. The characters contrasted to the disembodied narrator or hero are always thought through that culture’s understanding of how corporeality is to be recognized. The model of differential embodiment implies, however, that embodiment can be used to create authority without necessarily producing a single narrational perspective through which we are told the story—which de Lauretis implies. Rather, I am suggesting, these authors were creating an image of the authoritative position from which bodies could be read, a position that has implications for their role as author. This is the work done by narrative at this time to create authority, despite its tangential relationship to traditional narratology’s ways of speaking about narrators and the way in which “trust” is created. The Body Politic and Narrative Position To narrate, then, is to search for a way to view the subject matter. With the transformation of narrative by print culture and the erosion of appeals to tradition or to direct experience, narrative has come to depend on visibility as the principle for reliability in narration. This visibility, as we have seen, emphasizes the position from which a story is told, and raises the problem of the way in which that narrated space is occupied physically. It is at this point that an inquiry into narrative authority becomes involved in the problematics of narrative space. Chapter 4 suggested that the body transforms narrative space into a route of circulation. The body, we noted, always looks beyond itself. Because of this, narrative setting must be understood in terms of the movement that it creates. I concluded that discussion by noting that the best example of narrative space is the concept of circulation that much of new historicist work draws upon. Social and narrative circulation, we saw, points to the inherent instability of social space. Ultimately the real power of circulation arises from narrative dynamics—its ability to capture the paradoxes of the unstable corporeality represented in texts, and in social totalities. Although in chapter 4 I used circulation to


discuss the complexity of narrative space, it should be clear that it also has implications for the way that we think about the act of narrating itself. Toward the end of chapter 4 I noted Thomas Mann’s observation in The Magic Mountain about narration: “Let us not forget the condition of life as of narration: that we can never see the whole picture at once—unless we propose to throw overboard all the God-conditioned forms of human knowledge.”12 Mann is ultimately describing the act of narration, and suggests that narrative itself arises from the difficulty of finding one position from which to describe a whole series of events. This difficulty, as we have seen, can be traced back in part to the nature of the human body, which defies the static location that we often associate with setting. Indeed, we have seen that the spatial instabilities of the human body resonate deeply with the problematics of narration itself, since both suggest the need for movement. Narratives and bodies circulate, we can say, and in doing so construct a complex textual hermeneutics that cannot be equated with static symbols. We have seen, however, that narrative hermeneutics frequently relies on just such static figures to represent its own context for interpretation. In chapter 2, I argued that narrative always constructs a more general notion of bodily contact between text, author, and reader. I would like to suggest that we can read such figures as a response to the problems of narrative circulation that I began to discuss in chapter 4. Consider, for example, the way in which figures of the “body politic” are used in political rhetoric. Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies suggests that the body politic metaphor emerges out of older traditions of imagining the King in the late-medieval/early Renaissance period. Kantorowicz notes, “The Church as the mystical body of Christ—and that means: Christian society as composed of all the faithful, past, future, and present, actual and potential—might appear to the historian so typically mediaeval a concept, and one so traditional, that he would easily be inclined to forget how relatively new that notion was when Boniface VIII probed its strength and efficiency by using it as a weapon in his life-and-death struggle against Philip the Fair of France” in 1302.13 This corporate image of a group—in this case the Church, but nations as well— ultimately represents a notion of that group formed out of the relations between its parts and not out of some external authority that gave it form in an abstract way. Of course, the very idea that this form can be traced back to the body of Christ or to that of the king makes the formation ambivalent, since its corporate nature is coupled to a claim that some inherent authority stands behind that nature. Still, we can say that the body politic represents the emergence of modern definitions of nation


and authority. To speak of the body politic, in this sense, is to claim a certain authority for a whole image of the social state. The “body politic” metaphor that Kantorowicz describes may at first seem to have little relation to narrative authority, but in fact what is at stake within this metaphor is the “perspective” from which one can describe society. This perspective raises fundamentally narrative issues, and suggests the difficulty of thinking about the act of narration in general. Let us return to Hobbes’s invocation of the body politic at the outset of Leviathan, which I have already quoted in chapter 2. Hobbes imagines the body politic specifically in terms of the activity of the commonwealth: For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring ; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, in Latin CIVITAS, which is but an artificial man.14

Hobbes’s description of the state as an “artificial man” here is extraordinary—all the more so because the specific activity of the state usually goes unremarked by most commentators. Although we tend to think of the body politic as a static, spatial metaphor that explains the elements of a society by reference to a fixed hierarchy, Hobbes treats this trope instead as a way to describe what the society does. This is a dynamic model of the society that is organized around activity and event rather than location or quality. Hobbes’s artificial body is, we could say, narrative in the sense that it describes how political and social events should be understood and how agency can be recognized within such events. As political philosophy has long recognized, agency is a particularly complex issue when cultural context is taken into account. Hobbes’s image of the artificial man seems to recognize this complexity and to account for it not just by reference to various responsibilities or duties, but by constructing an image of decentered activity—activity dispersed throughout the whole society. Thus, just as narrative raises the question of agency in textuality and suggests that it must be dispersed throughout the writing/reading spectrum, so too does the body politic represent the transformation and dispersal of national authority. Along with its concern for agency, Hobbes’s body politic also negotiates narrative perspective. Hobbes’s body politic provides a perspective


from which the whole society can be viewed. Hobbes concludes his opening invocation of the artificial man in precisely these terms: But let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him only with his acquaintance, which are but few. He that is to govern a whole nation, must read in himself, not this or that particular man; but mankind: which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any language or science; yet when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be only to consider, if he also find not the same in himself. For this kind of doctrine admitteth no other demonstration. (6)

Hobbes offers his study as a meditation on the proper form of the social state. But the concern that drives him to this study and to the trope of the body politic with which he opens it is the difficulty of finding a perspective from which the society can be viewed. We are tempted, Hobbes notes, to find an image of ourselves, or of some particular person. The society, however, is comprised and defined precisely by the multiplicity of the “body.” It is, in other words, an object of study precisely because it is genuinely to be seen in no one person. This problem can be described in terms of perspective—there is no position from which the society can be viewed, since its form is larger than any one or group of people. The body politic here emerges as a way of envisioning something that cannot literally be seen. The society is “in-visible” to Hobbes not so much because it is an abstract construction, an approximation like that of the “norm” or an “average.” Instead, the society is invisible because vision itself is inadequate to understanding an entity that comprises elements so foreign to the King while at the same time containing the king. The nation is both “self ” and “other,” and vision seems to Hobbes unable to grasp the seemingly impossible position from which the King must view the society.15 The body politic describes, then, an imaginary position from which the whole of the nation can be narrated. We have seen, in fact, that it is precisely the body that routinely creates problems for defining a single location from which a narrative can be viewed. Faced with the demand that he adopt an impossible position from which to view the nation, the king is left with only reading as an alternative. In Hobbes’s account, reading marks precisely the escape from the literal bodily position that disallows the king’s understanding. In doing so, Hobbes ultimately adopts the kind of circulatory model that I have attributed to Mann and to Gallagher. Lynch has noted a similar concern for imagining the whole nation in the early British novel, and provides a way to link Hobbes’s


body politic and the circulation of chapter 4. Lynch notes the popularity in the eighteenth century of novels that followed a coin or banknote from owner to owner. While such novels share a great deal with the openended and incidental structure of picaresque narratives, these stories also suggest the urge to provide an image of the whole society. Using the example of Thomas Bridges’s The Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770), Lynch writes Unlike Tom Jones or Roderick Random, both foundlings who are found out, the banknote’s wanderings do not take him home to the landed estate that inspires eighteenth-century writers’ fantasies of permanent residences and absolute private properties. The banknote moves on, into the pockets of persons in high life. Yet, as his momentary return to the little apothecary [an incident in Bridges’s novel] suggests, the banknote’s travels can make circulation seem more tidily circular. As late as 1820, this project retained its appeal: in Buy a Broom: An Interesting Moral Tale for Children, the talking broom that passes through a succession of owners also returns to the hands of its maker, although only long enough to be refurbished and resold. Like Asmodeus, the limping devil who knows how to maximize the city’s visibility, such circulating protagonists give readers the wherewithal to conceptualize society as a whole. They assuage fears that the social is of unlimited and hence inapprehensible extension. (98)

Lynch describes a struggle within the early novel very similar to what I have suggested in the body politic: the attempt to overcome the perceptual limitations of embodied individuals and instead to “see” society as a whole. Indeed, Lynch’s emphasis on circulation is significant, since it approaches the problem of the perspective from which to view the society in much the same terms that I have used in discussing Hobbes’s invocation of the artificial man. Lynch observes that the banknote is able to achieve its unique perspective precisely because it has no body: it is literally the “nobody” that narrators will increasingly approximate in their central characters and narrators. We can say, then, that the creation of a position from which one can narrate involves finding a way to negotiate the bodies of characters and viewers. If Lynch’s reading of the early novel is correct, we can understand the trope of the body politic as an inherently narrative way of providing a glimpse of social relations. Narratives overcome the bodily limitations of any one perspective in order to allow us to understand something that is inherently superindividual. But they do so not in the way that we expect from humanist criticism that claims that narratives bring together many selves. Instead, as Lynch and Hobbes suggest in their


own ways, and as I will argue in this chapter, narratives overcome the limitations of individual perspectives precisely by negotiating the embodiment of the narrator and characters. Hobbes particularly allows us to see this, since Leviathan as we have described it is precisely the project of escaping the limitations of the body by turning to the disembodiment of reading. But this disembodiment in turn is possible only through the metaphor of another body that acts out the events that no one individual can see—the body politic. Lynch describes narratives of social circulation in which a vision of the whole society is accomplished only at the expense of actually participating within the society. But these narratives, too, install a dialectic of embodiment rather than merely celebrating a stable position from which the whole society can be viewed. After all, the money that circulates through the society is not free from bodily life, but is in many ways a vital part of keeping the body alive and well. We have seen the way that the philosophical ambiguity of capital troubles sociological discourse about population in chapter 4. Lynch suggests this facet of these narratives when she notes that the banknote is an element of an economic system that may well seem foreign and overpowering to the individuals caught within it. The banknote here is not simply a disinterested observer, but is instead a vital but abstract part of the bodily lives of characters and readers. The banknote captures the ambiguity of the “material” in economic terms as both an abstract product of social forces and a concrete element that cannot be ignored. It exemplifies in the simplest form the dialectic that we will observe throughout this chapter between embodiment and disembodiment that is essential to creating narrative authority. Creating authority through differential embodiment is a response, I would like to argue, to the kind of narrative dynamics that I have described at the end of chapter 4 and at the outset of this chapter. There I suggested that narrative creates fundamental problems about the perspective from which it should be viewed, and noted that narrative naturally seems to move and circulate in a way that is antithetical to overarching and static images of social space. I have argued that the “objectness” of the text and the characters represented within it becomes an issue as soon as our traditional ways of thinking about authority begin to erode. We are challenged to find a position from which to view them, and are caught up within a system of circulation and constant narrative movement. Because this movement can be traced back to the nature of the body itself, it should be no surprise that attempts to resolve this problem involve finding a disembodied perspective. Disembodied narration solves—or appears to solve—a whole host of problems for position and


circulation that we have noted throughout this study. It makes it possible for us to imagine a position not caught up within these dynamics and thus capable of claiming authority to represent the whole. In a larger sense, the narrative strategy of differential embodiment ultimately speaks to the nature of narrative hermeneutics. In chapter 2, I argued that narratives necessarily create an image of a corporeality that transcends individual characters, and that makes sense of the relation between characters, authors, texts, and readers. Differential embodiment is both a confirmation and denial of that process. It is a confirmation because it defines our relationship as readers to a text through the model of corporeality—in this case, the balance between embodied and disembodied figures. Differential embodiment is a denial of these dynamics, however, because it creates credibility precisely by denying the embodied position from which a subject is described or a text is read. These narratives appear to create a universal position of “nobody” at the expense of embodied peripheral characters. The corporeal interaction between text and reader that Cixious described, or the physical hermeneutics of Beloved, work because they accept that we do interact physically with the text. These corporeal hermeneutics are disauthorized; they stand outside of the traditions and institutions that usually grant reliability to a text. This is one of the reasons, I think, that Morrison’s novel is so ambiguous about its status as an object. We will recall that Morrison describes the novel as “not a story to pass on” and specifically locates it within an oral context. The return to orality and away from the textuality that we have associated with modern narrative clearly shows Morrison’s attempt to escape from the traditional dynamics of differential embodiment and the text as an object. In insisting on the corporeality of our interaction with the text, Morrison rejects the tradition of differential embodiment that characterizes modern narrative. Three Approaches to Differential Embodiment I have argued that our ways of thinking about narration can be traced back to how narratives and their writers negotiate the corporeality of our relationship to the text. The model of differential embodiment responds to the problems of locating perspective in one distinct position. My description of differential embodiment thus far is, however, historically very limited. Lynch’s discussion of embodiment in the early British novel, while suggestive of more general narrative dynamics, clearly reflects the particular historical and cultural context of the narratives that she is studying. Having defined the general narrative issue of embodiment and


narration, I would like to consider the various ways in which the general principle of differential embodiment can be actualized in particular narrative styles and cultures. Of especial interest is the role of general bodies that we observed in the previous section, complicated but not fundamentally rejected by the principle of differential embodiment. Such a list cannot be complete, but should suggest how this basic model of embodiment in narrative authority can be transformed by different periods and genres. Differential Embodiment in Contrasting Characters Lynch’s discussion offers what we can call the first model of differential embodiment. It contrasts characters who are heavily embodied and others who are relatively disembodied. That disembodied character functions as the point of view from which we are encouraged to see the events of the narrative. In the eighteenth-century narratives that Lynch discusses, this contrast is frequently used for comic as well as moralistic purposes. The embodied characters are often the object of scorn—although at times the scorn can be mild and even sympathetic—while the disembodied character represents moral superiority by virtue of self-control. When Tobias Smollett rewrites the Don Quixote story in The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, for example, he does so by exaggerating the difference of embodiment in Cervantes’s novel. Smollett’s knight is allowed to remain an aloof social critic while his sidekick, Crabshaw, is frequently beaten and bloodied by Greaves’s would-be adversaries. The novel opens with the knight carrying into a tavern the groaning body of his squire, whose misfortunes allow Smollett to introduce his characters and Greaves to prove his sanity and good breeding: Having deposited his burthen carefully on the floor, he addressed himself to the company in these words: “Be not surprised, good people, at this unusual appearance, which I shall take an opportunity to explain; and forgive the rude and boisterous manner in which I have demanded, and indeed forced admittance. The violence of my intrusion was the effect of necessity. In crossing the river, my squire and his horse were swept away by the stream; and with some difficulty I have been able to drag him ashore, though I am afraid my assistance reached him too late: for, since I brought him to land, he has given no signs of life.” Here he was interrupted by a groan, which issued from the chest of the squire, and terrified the spectators as much as it comforted the master.16

Smollett’s methods here are typical of the narrative strategy that Lynch describes: a disembodied central character (we know him by his manners


and voice) is contrasted to the physical spectacle of the peripheral characters, who function as objects of analysis and foils for this central figure. Although this first model of differential embodiment is clearest in comic or moralizing narrative because of the ease with which the contrast between characters can be made to serve evaluative purposes, this contrast can organize our perspective even where didacticism is muted. It is possible to read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as an example of this type of differential embodiment by treating the picture itself as an exaggeration of the main character’s embodiment for the purposes of negotiating narrative tensions. Wilde’s narrator is not particularly remarkable by narrative standards—few readers will recall immediately if the novel is in the first or third person, for example. Indeed, it is a characteristic of Wilde’s writing to use convention ironically, rather than to make radically new stylistic choices. Wilde’s famous wit, after all, works by taking a conventional idea and following out the logic or metaphor so that its seemingly conventional sentiments are in fact scandalous. Dorian remarks that “women give to men the very gold of their lives,” to which Lord Henry replies, “but they invariously want it back in such very small change.”17 Wilde’s narrative style seems to follow this general pattern, accepting the general conventions of third-person omniscient narration while using a conventional object like the painting of Gray for very unconventional narrative purposes. The picture in this sense represents a solution to the artistic problem of how to provide commentary on Gray’s life without directly intruding as a voice in the narrative. Wilde’s is quite explicit in his preface to the novel in rejecting such inserted commentary: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is the art’s aim” (xi). He does this much as we have seen the early British novelists do, according to Lynch: he sets up a strongly embodied figure (the painting of Gray) that becomes an object rendering readers (and Gray himself ) relatively disembodied. Clearly Wilde’s methods are rather different from what we see in Smollett’s novel, since Dorian Gray does not depend upon a single character who is disembodied so much as one character who is so strongly embodied that everyone else in the narrative becomes by implication relatively disembodied. Nonetheless, the pattern of differential embodiment here is clear. Differential Embodiment in Sentimental Identification A second form of embodiment in narration can be identified within the direct competitor of the comic model that we have discussed—the sentimental novel. The contrast of styles between Fielding and Richardson


has been a staple of criticism of the early novel since Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Richardson’s sentimental style and the tradition that follows after it offer an alternative way to think about embodiment and narration that nonetheless continues to function in terms of a differential embodiment used to create readerly and authorial perspective on the represented objects and events. Although frequently dismissed in the past as socially unaware or artistically naïve, sentimental fiction has increasingly been recognized by critics as a narrative mode with sophisticated rhetorical goals. Margaret Cohen’s recent discussion of the sentimental and realist novels in France, The Sentimental Education of the Novel, argues that the goals of sentimental fiction are frequently the same as those of the more highly valued realist novel. Cohen suggests that the qualities that we most associate with the sentimental novel—the vagueness of social background and the abstractness of historical context—are in fact consciously adopted discursive techniques designed to help readers to identify with the characters and to recognize the generality of the moral situations in which they find themselves. Cohen writes, “Sentimental novels, like tragedy, efface material details to concentrate all attention on the progress of the action.”18 Cohen goes on to note that this abstract style specifically creates a “light touch” by limiting material details of the characters: “On the cover of her sentimental social novel, Deux Originaux (1835), B. Monborne places a line from Alexander Pope that well captures sentimentality’s descriptive restraint: ‘It is enough to be able, with a light touch / To lace shadow here and there, light’ ” (49). Cohen’s claim that the sentimental novel works to create a universal moral context in which the reader can see him or herself is a rhetorical goal recognized by most of the best-known work on sentimentalism. In linking this context to the “lightness” of the sentimental novel’s treatment of character, Cohen suggests these moral goals are crafted by carefully manipulating the embodiment of characters. Sentimental fiction seems to break from the model that Lynch describes of creating some characters as embodied and others as disembodied. From Lynch we have learned that the simple identification of reader and character would be neither natural nor easy to achieve, given the tension between reader and the book as object. To embody characters explicitly would seem to work against any identification on the part of the audience. Thus, we would expect that character bodies in the sentimental novel would be backgrounded whenever possible. And, indeed, this is certainly the case in much sentimental fiction. Cohen notes that sentimental fiction frequently leaves its principle characters relatively undefined physically and instead insists on abstract physical


qualities that imply moral characteristics rather than emphasizing appearance itself. Cohen reveals this technique even in stories where the physical body seems to be an object of special narrative focus: The sentimental blazon is one more convention that disrupts sentimentality’s overwhelming concentration on the actions resulting from the founding sentimental conflict. The sentimental novel suspends the progress of the action to detail the physical body of the protagonist when the protagonist is the object of another character’s desire. Generally, a man looks at a woman, and the man expresses her beauty, using rhetorical strategies from the poetic tradition of the blazon. He conjures up the woman’s charms by breaking down her beauty into her discrete, physical features, dwelling in particular on these features’ visual appeal. (54)

Cohen goes on to suggest that this focus on the body is specifically aimed at the sentimental goal of stripping aside material details for the sake of focus on moral conflict: “With the blazon, the sentimental novel asserts the material/moral opposition in order to subordinate the first term to the second. While the sentimental blazon might seem to disrupt sentimental action, the topos thus in fact reinforces its importance” (55). It would seem, then, that sentimentalism is a kind of triumph of narrative over corporeality, a successful step outside the issues of the body that is only challenged in the later nineteenth century with realism’s insistence on particular bodily and social characteristics. This explanation of sentimentalism ignores the fact that many of the most striking concerns of the sentimental novel are organized precisely around corporeality. The sentimental novel frequently evokes readers’ physical response to the narrative, using it to confirm their own proper moral qualities in most cases. Especially in America, the sentimental novel is most consistently associated with the issue of slavery, where the body of the characters is the overarching “problem” that confronts the white, middle-class readers of this fiction. The positive function of the body within sentimental fiction is made very clear by Amy Shrager Lang’s comparison of narrative voice in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills. Both novels are normally considered sentimental in their goals and methods, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a significantly better example of the form than Davis’s story. The latter is marked by ambivalences in tone and narrator positioning that have led many critics to see the story as realism more than sentimentalism. Lang observes that both stories are about characters who are outside the American middle-class mainstream—the slaves of Stowe’s novel, and the laborers of Davis’s story. In the end, Stowe


manages to integrate these slaves into the universalized life that sentimentalism uses as its means of rhetorically manipulating reader identity: [S]triking . . . is the sureness of the artist’s hand, her unhesitating ability to read Tom’s character in his face. However exotic he may be—with his “truly African features”—Tom is no enigma. His blackness, the outward sign of his enslavement, is not opaque but, like a daguerreotype, a transparency through which his essential nature shines. Tom’s condition as a slave is, after all, only an accident of history; it neither obstructs our view of him nor does it, apparently, shape his character.19

Lang’s description echoes the way that we have seen sentimentalism characterized by other critics: as a mode of abstracting a situation from historical and social context in order to emphasize a general moral situation with which the audience can identify without reserve. Davis’s story, however, is characterized by none of this confidence in her ability to present characters in a way that will overcome historical context. Lang writes, In sharp contrast to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills sets out to introduce us to her protagonist, she is beset by difficulty. The narrator’s view of the protagonist is obstructed, first, by a failure of vision itself. It is difficult, she observes, to see anything through the stifling smoke of the mills on a rainy day. But she is not only blinded by rain and smoke; her vision is impaired as well by the indistinctness of the object at which she is looking. Wolfe is one of “the masses of men, with dull, besotted faces,” “myriads of . . . furnace-tenders” any of whom might serve equally well as the object of her contemplation.20

Lang points out quite effectively the striking contrast between these two narratives, despite their similar and ultimately sentimental aims. While Stowe’s subject matter would seem to be the more challenging, since she must overcome not only historical and social context, but also the fact of physical embodiment in the slaves that she represents, Davis would seem to have a far more accessible topic. Wolfe, after all, is white and unmarked by any particular physical characteristics, which would seem to hinder the audience’s ability to put themselves in his position. Although his economic and social context is likely to be quite different if not altogether unfamiliar to Davis’s audience, it seems less so than the life of slavery described by Stowe. What is remarkable about the differences between these two narratives is that the facts of Tom’s embodiment do not hinder but rather aid Stowe’s story. Initially, this seems to fly in the face of everything that we


expect from sentimental fiction, since I suggested before that one natural way of reading this fiction is as a transcending of the differential embodiment used by eighteenth-century comic novelists. What Lang suggests is that sentimental fiction has to stage this transcending continually within each narrative, rather than being able to rely on some rhetorical shift that occurs to establish the genre as a whole. Stowe’s novel plays on the tension between a racially marked surface and a universal interior human identity. Certainly if we think of the penultimate scene of Tom’s death at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, its resonance with Christ’s death works precisely because the evil slave-owner Legree insists on seeing Tom in the bodily terms that deny this comparison: “After all, what a fuss, for a dead nigger!” says Legree.21 In the comic novels of Fielding and Smollett we noted a differential embodiment in which explicitly corporeal peripheral characters allowed the disembodied authority of the main character to be accepted by contrast, and thus to create a position of authority from which the narrative could be unfolded. This same logic of differential embodiment is played out in the sentimental novel, although in a very different way. Here we see a similar focus on the contrast between embodiment and disembodiment used to position the reader. This contrast is worked out, however, not through two types of characters, but through the difference between the apparent bodily marks of the surface and the universal, disembodied self of the “inner character” to which that surface gives way. The same kind of productive tension between embodiment and disembodiment can be produced by gender as well. Nancy Armstrong’s influential discussion of British domestic fiction, Desire and Domestic Fiction, although not strictly a treatment of sentimentalism, suggests how this tension works. As I noted in chapter 3, Armstrong examines how middle-class, domestic ideals come to dominate British society during the eighteenth century, and consequently come to transform narrative. According to Armstrong, these ideals replace older cultural ways of thinking about social power: “Competing class interests are . . . represented as a struggle between the sexes that can be completely resolved in terms of the sexual contract.”22 What is especially interesting here is the performative quality that Armstrong observes in this fiction. This writing does not merely reflect changes in the culture; it also actively tries to transform that culture’s way of thinking about these new domestic ideals: “The sexual division of labor may have begun by allowing two different ways of understanding the social reality to coexist side by side, rather like the Puritan model of marriage. But the insertion of a new idea of work into the field of social information would eventually make the


sexual division of labor serve as a way of reconceiving the whole” (93). The fiction, then, uses the physical differences between the genders to transcend them and to institute a new and universal idea about personal regulation and the nature of domestic space. It is for this reason that Armstrong claims that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (8). The gendered body here is an essential element of the narrative despite the fact that its force eventually depends on seeing a universal principle that transcends men and women. We can say, then, that despite critical claims that the sentimental novel inhabits the purely abstract—or, for that matter, suggestions that the comic novel wallows entirely in corporeal excess—we can see here that it is precisely the contrast between the two that drives the novel. In a story where this contrast is lacking—as, for example, in Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills—the sentimental goals of the novel will be fundamentally confused and problematic. Differential Embodiment in the Text as Object We can describe a third way in which the embodiment of characters is handled as narratives organize readerly and authorial perspective. Although the contrasting bodies used for comic or moral purposes and the sentimental bodies used for reader identification both represent important narrative aesthetics, it is clear that neither exemplifies the way that narratologists most often think about the relationship between reader and text. Indeed, Robyn Warhol has suggested in several recent articles that the strong emotional response that sentimental narratives seek to create has been slighted by narrative critics, who see it as a marginal aspect of reader response. She asks, “Why is it that we resent being made to cry? To be more specific: why do we (I mean educated, self-conscious, theoretically sophisticated, socially, and culturally progressive readers and viewers) tend to respond to ‘sentimental’ texts with dismissive annoyance, even (or especially) when they have the power to ‘get to us’?”23 Throughout this book I have argued that narratology reflects modern narrative and modern ways of thinking about the body. If we hope to define the post-sentimental way of imagining embodiment in narration, we might well turn to a popular modern description of narration and readerly perspective—Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony. Bakhtin claims, as we will recall, that Dostoevsky’s method of organizing character voices is a break from tradition: “all the elements of novelistic structure in Dostoevsky are profoundly original; all are determined by that new artistic task that only he could pose and solve with the requisite scope


and depth: the task of constructing a polyphonic world and destroying the established forms of the fundamentally monologic (homophonic) European novel.”24 At the base of this very well-know claim about the polyphonic novel rests an assumption about narrative that critics have less-often discussed. According to Bakhtin, the shift from monologic to polyphonic narrative is a change in the nature of textual objects. Bakhtin writes, [O]rdinary pragmatic links at the level of the plot (whether of an objective of [sic] psychological order) are insufficient in Dostoevsky’s world: such links presuppose, after all, that characters have become objects, fixed elements in the author’s design; such links bind and combine finalized imagines of people in the unity of a monologically perceived and understood world; there is no presumption of a plurality of equally-valid consciousnesses, each with its own world. In Dostoevsky’s novels, the ordinary pragmatics of the plot play a secondary role and perform special and unusual functions. The ultimate clamps that hold his novelistic world together are a different sort entirely; the fundamental event revealed through his novel does not lend itself to an ordinary pragmatic interpretation at the level of plot. (7)

Bakhtin is suggesting, of course, that Dostoevsky’s novel is less objective than the traditional monologic novel. We should note, however, the underlying assumption in this passage: narrative texts are comprised of elements that must be seen as distinct and object-like. The narrative is made up of voices that appear to readers as things to be analyzed and interrelated. It is for this reason that, even in the polyphonic novel, constituent narrative elements must be “clamped” together. Bakhtin’s description of distinct voices that appear like objects to be interpreted is echoed throughout narratological criticism. It is a commonplace to speak about a text as comprising various voices that are combined within a particular style of narration. The tendency to think of narration as made up of multiple voices has many sources, but in an Anglo-American context can be traced back in part to Hugh Kenner’s concept of the “Uncle Charlie” principle. In discussing Joyce’s word choices, Kenner makes what today is a fairly common observation: that the language used to describe character actions reflects the way that the characters think and speak. Kenner writes, “a speck of his characterizing vocabulary attends our sense of him. A word he need not even utter is there like a gnat in the air beside him, for us to perceive in the same field of attention in which we note how ‘scrupulously’ he [Stephen’s Uncle Charlie] brushes his hat. This is apparently something new in fiction,


the normally neutral narrative vocabulary pervaded by a little cloud of idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative.”25 Kenner’s own word choices suggest how much this approach to narrative treats voices as objects to be studied—they form a “field” or a “cloud” in which we pick out individual elements to understand the characters. According to this way of thinking, narration is made up of elements drawn from different ways of looking at the world—different voices—that may reflect aesthetic or thematic rather than mimetic aims. It is for this reason that Ann Banfield has described these types of mixedvoice narrational styles as “unspeakable.” Describing the “idealization of language which constitutes narrative style,” Banfield contrasts speech and writing: Because the writer of fiction nowhere “speaks” in the novel, the finished work has a different relation to the act which produced it than is the case with speech. Speech occurs in time, and the product of this process is structured by this subservience to time. The sentences and their formatives are necessarily spoken in a certain order, and that is the order they retain in speech as a product. . . . The process of writing—what is called “composition”—also occurs in time, but its product can free itself from the structure imposed by time, by sequence, by the order of production. The writer, of course, is subject to the rules of the grammar; furthermore, at some level, he continues to produce from beginning to end. But sentences so written, or parts of them, can be altered; they can be rewritten, reworked, revised, and the sequential order of syntax ignored at the level of composition. That is, a word can be changed at any point.26

For Banfield, writing becomes a field of objects in which distinct elements can be isolated and used to characterize the meaning of the text. Such a way of thinking about the text implies that both author and critic are physically uninvolved in the text; they stand back, observe the whole, and analyze or tinker with individual parts. There can be little doubt, I think, that narratology has been fascinated by these types of mixed voices within a text, and that this fascination is one of the central aesthetic principles of modern narrative and one of the assumptions of contemporary narratology. Seymour Chatman has recently complained about voice as a “metaphor that continues to be widely used but insufficiently examined by narratology, functioning centrally in such otherwise divergent theories as Gérard Genett’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s, Wayne Booth’s and Franz Stanzel’s.”27 This emphasis is the case not only in not only in traditional narratology, but also in more recent attempts by feminists to reclaim narratology for more


political and cultural uses. Susan Lanser’s Fictions of Authority, for example, questions the lack of attention to gender in narratology, but develops this critique by using voices as the basis for her analysis: “I take as a point of departure the hypothesis that female voice—a term used here simply to designate the narrator’s grammatical gender—is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practices.”28 What is especially important for our discussion is that attributing to the narrative text a kind of object-like status transforms the corporeal interaction between text, author, and reader that we have been discussing as differential embodiment. We have seen throughout that our ways of thinking about narration usually involve exaggerating the physicality of one group of characters or components of the text in order to disembody another group or component of the text. In treating the text as an object to be analyzed, narratologists and writers of this type of modernist narrative are clearly following this principle. Indeed, while creating the combination of voices that I have described here, modernist narrative seeks to radically disembody the author and reader. We will recall in this sense Stephen Dedalus’s famous remark that “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”29 The type of reader interaction that is implied by Joyce is clearly a break from the models of the eighteenth-century comic and sentimental novels that we have discussed. But as in those earlier models, we can see disembodiment being created by the exaggeration of the physicality of other elements—in this case, of the voices that make up the objects of the text. The position of disembodied observer is, of course, a now-natural part of the way that we think of analysis. Narratology has frequently seen itself as a scientific discipline that attempts to describe narratives objectively and to divine generally applicable principles relevant to all texts.30 We should recall, however, that this way of thinking about observation and the position from which a narrative can be constructed and interpreted is a rather recent invention. Drawing from Foucault and Lefebvre, Mary Poovey notes the rise of the concept of “abstract space” in early industrialism—which she defines as “conceptualized as isotropic (as everywhere the same) and as reducible (or already reduced) to a formal (that is, empty) schema or grid”—best embodied in the factory system.31 Such an abstract space, she notes, has an “ontological dependence on representation, which functions to obscure its own material conditions of possibility” (27). Earlier in this chapter we saw that the body politic trope exemplified by Hobbes achieves a narrative goal precisely by creating


a certain kind of embodiment. Poovey notes that this trope was transformed during the Victorian period to create the disembodied position that I have associated with modernist narrative. In Britain, she explains, the metaphor of the body politic was supplanted by appeals to the “great body of people” or the social body more generally: The nineteenth-century concept of a social body carries traces of both the political domain, to which the concept of a body politic properly belongs, and the economic domain, to which the “great body of the people” referred. The substitution of social for politic, however, and the disappearance of the people suggests that a new conceptual entity had begun to emerge by the early nineteenth century. The gradual consolidation of a distinctively “social” domain was facilitated by efforts to comprehend— to understand, measure, and represent—the poverty that seemed increasingly visible in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. (8)

The distinction between these two tropes described by Poovey transforms the terms in which we have seen the trope used by Hobbes. The “great body” of the people is imagined as visible in precisely the way that the national body seemed invisible for Hobbes. And, of course, this visibility shifts the understanding of corporeality in this trope, emphasizing the difference between the embodiment of the masses and the disembodiment of the (upper class) spectators who understand and measure them. In many ways, this shift is merely a confirmation of a much larger understanding of objective scientific methods that arts have drawn on—we think, for example, of Nelson Goodman’s theory of artworks as “samples from the sea” that I discussed in chapter 1. But we should also recognize that the shift that Poovey notes works precisely by making this social object—the great body of the people—into the very figure of embodiment. While Hobbes’s body politic is a body and raises issues of physicality, it is also an object with broad cosmic and symbolic resonances. It is, in this sense, only partially corporeal. The great body that Poovey describes, conversely, is entirely physical in a way that creates a separate, disembodied space from which it should be viewed by the analyst.32 Reading Embodied Narration This discussion of embodiment suggests a very different approach to narration. At the outset of this chapter I noted that narratology has focused on the gap between authors and narrators as perhaps the most common way to understand the rhetorical work of a story. From such a perspective, readers must always question the authority of the narrator


in order to recognize the genuine message and perspective within a narrative. In this chapter I have suggested something rather different by linking authority to the way in which narratives construct embodiment. I have argued that narratives position readers by carefully manipulating embodied and disembodied figures within the text. Two practical implications result if we accept this argument. First, authority and reader positioning need not occur exclusively through the manipulation of the narrator itself. The disembodied locations that I have associated with narrative authority can be produced in many ways. I have already noted an example of this in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where reader position is created through the picture without any particular reference to the narrator. Indeed, the narrator is virtually invisible within the story, despite what I suggested is the complex rhetorical work going on to craft our evaluation of Gray. We have also seen the ways in which readers are positioned through sentimental fiction within the perspective of universal moral categories. In general we can say, then, that the principle of differential embodiment greatly broadens the scope of what must be considered in describing the construction of narrative authority. At the outset of this chapter I noted the claims of postcolonial critics that the way that narratives create and use authority is much broader than narratologists have described. For these critics, authority is part of the way in which society and objectivity are imagined. In the concept of differential embodiment, I have suggested one specific way in which that broad definition of cultural authority can be brought to bear on specific choices by narratives and authors. Second, within a focus on the relationship between narrator and author we must consider the way in which embodiment is deployed. It is common to describe the way in which narratives position readers by characterizing the implied intellectual or moral qualities of the narrator. Wayne Booth launches the tradition of seeing personal belief as the basis upon which we occupy a narrative and evaluate the narrator. It is only as I read that I become the self whose beliefs must coincide with the author’s. Regardless of my real beliefs and practices, I must subordinate my mind and heart to the book if I am to enjoy it to the full. The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement. (138)

Booth’s discussion of the implied author and implied reader here has led to a huge volume of material applying this distinction to individual


texts, as well as articulating the nuances of how we sort through these distinctions, how we resist texts whose values we do not share, and so on. Although this description of the reader’s gradual recognition of the implied values of the author still resonates with the everyday experience of reading narrative, we can supplement this discussion in important ways with an interest in narrative embodiment. From the perspective of an interest in embodiment, we might note that much of our evaluation of “dramatized” narrators—those narrators whose opinions or observations we are to recognize as at least somewhat at odds with those of the author—depends on corporeal clues. Often we think of our evaluation in terms of the narrator’s moral or intellectual qualities. Indeed, if we read narratology’s discussion of implied readers, we might well think that we recognize unreliability through rather abstract means. But the best-known examples of such narrators tend to be those in which the speaker is clearly embodied and positioned in a specific context. We might think, for example, of the nervous body attributed to Gilman’s narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper, probably the most commonly used story for introducing unreliable narration in the undergraduate classroom. Gilman’s narrator remarks, I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief. But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.33

Indeed, the most common way in which to imply that a narrator is not to be entirely trusted is to attribute to him or her strong physical dispositions. We know, for example, not to trust Jason Compson’s opinions about Quentin (“Once a bitch, always a bitch”) in The Sound and the Fury in part because of the way in which his body overshadows his mind.34 The most important element in our evaluation of him is probably moral and emotional—we recognize that he cannot control his temper, and that his actions are strongly influenced by desire and resentment. But an equally memorable way in which Faulkner signals to the reader not to trust him is by giving him a weakness to gasoline fumes, a character trait that firmly roots him in his body and probably predisposes readers to question his opinions. There is a certain circularity in this. I have suggested that modern narrative takes on the task of crafting an “objective” description in which facts and events are visible. Our


ideas of objectivity, in turn, usually depend on ideas about the power of the mind to transcend particular physical circumstances. Thus, it is in some sense natural that stories ascribe strong physical markings to untrustworthy figures. At the same time, however, this corporeality is clearly used to mark figures even when it has little or no relationship to the reason that they are untrustworthy. Consider Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which not only is a classic example of unreliable narration but also a novel that uses the narrator’s embodiment in very sophisticated ways. Much of the effect of this story of the adultery between Edward Ashburnham and the narrator’s wife Florence Dowell is created by Ford’s choice of the narrator of this story. Beginning in their courtship, Florence creates an elaborate story about a heart condition that will not allow her to become excited; she cannot, for this reason, ever have sex with her husband. Through much of the story, it is clear, the narrator has explicitly avoided allowing himself to see the truth because of how much he enjoys the peace and stability of this strange arrangement. After all, it is as much for the destruction of this peace as for the actual deception that he blames Florence and Edward: “I have the right to say it, since for years he was my wife’s lover, since he killed her, since he broke up all the pleasantnesses that there were in my life.”35 During the course of telling the story, however, the narrator gradually comes to recognize how he has been deceived. He remarks that “I have tried to figure her out, I have thought about her as I might do about a problem in algebra” (113). And yet, in other ways, he remains blind throughout the narrative to the larger causes of the affair and to the full extent of how Florence has deceived him. He remarks, for example, “I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness. She need not have done what she did. She was an American, a New Englander. She had not the hot passions of these Europeans” (69). Ford’s narrator follows the pattern of so many dramatized narrators of explicitly positioning himself physically for the reader: “I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars” (19). But, unlike some other narratives in which it is an excess of the body that makes the narrator untrustworthy, in this novel it is the lack of physical desire that seems to make the narrator unreliable. He remarks about the lack of passion when he is first courting Florence: “I fancy that, if I had shown warmth then, she would have acted the proper wife to me, or would have put me back again. But, because


I acted like a Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I suppose, go through with the part of a male nurse. Perhaps she thought that I should not mind” (80). The narrator here is not to be trusted because he has pulled himself back from his body and from passion so fully to become a “Philadelphia gentleman” that he has lost the ability or drive to recognize the facts around him. This may seem at odds with the model that I have been describing, in which corporeality is associated with unreliability. We should recognize, however, that by denying passion the narrator draws attention to his own body. He inadequately occupies his body, incompletely feels the passions typical of readers. Ford’s narrator in this sense raises the issue of corporeality, and by that very act marks himself as likely to be unreliable. Ford’s novel shows differential embodiment at its most powerful, precisely because is reveals just how subtle the appeal to narrator corporeality can be.36 Corporeal Levers I have suggested that modern narrative creates authority for itself by setting up a schema of differential embodiment through which heavily corporealized and relative “nobodies” are contrasted in order to create a position for the reader. Throughout this chapter we have seen why this contrast is necessary, and I have suggested some of the implications that arise for how narratives are constructed and analyzed. We could say that textual as well as cultural dynamics work to make the patterns that we have seen in these texts a necessity. At the same time, however, I have also suggested in various places throughout this study the positive effects that might result from some of the more complex dynamics that we have observed in narrative. In particular, I concluded chapter 4 by turning to Susan Langer’s aesthetic theory to suggest some of the positive aesthetic resonances of narrative circulation. By way of conclusion to this chapter, I would like to offer a similar reading of the importance of lightness and embodiment in narration. One way to contextualize the play of embodiment and reader positions is suggested by Elaine Scarry in her influential The Body in Pain. Most people associate this book with Scarry’s claim that pain cannot be represented, and that it in fact isolates individuals. Scarry’s claims about the profoundly disempowering effects of torture have direct political implications. But Scarry has a larger philosophical claim at the back of her discussion of pain, studying the way that material objects can transform our experience of the body. Scarry’s example is the way that a chair alleviates the weight of our body and gives us a sense of physical freedom akin to flight. In this sense, the chair represents a response to the “pain”


of our experience of earthbound weight; it is an embodied wish: “The shape of the chair is not the shape of the skeleton, the shape of body weight, nor even the shape of pain-perceived, but the shape of perceivedpain-wished-gone.”37 This is a passage worth note because it discusses precisely the sort of transfer of weight that we have been discussing throughout this chapter in the concept of differential embodiment. The artifact represents the wish to escape from corporeality. But, of course, the chair does not simply free us from the body, but rather transforms our experience of the body. It becomes a tool through which we continue to experience the world: “The two levels of projection are transformations: first from an invisible aspect of consciousness to a visible but disappearing action; second, from a disappearing action to an enduring material form. Thus, in work, a perception is danced; in the chair, a dancedperception is sculpted” (290). The tool here represents a wish, a projection, but then becomes a means by which the bodily world continues to be experienced. It is thus a dual entity: a wish of escape from corporeality and a tool through which corporeality returns in new forms. It is important to recognize that this transfer of weight does not simply cancel that weight or produce disembodiment. Scarry describes these projective tools as levers, a term that emphasizes this transfer: A perception about human sentience is, through labor, projected into the free-standing artifact (chair, coat, poem, telescope, medical vaccine), and in turn the artifact refers back to human sentience, either directly extending its powers and acuity (poem, telescope) or indirectly extending its powers and acuity by eliminating its aversiveness (chair, vaccine). The first has no meaning without the second: the human act of projection assumes the artifact’s consequent act of reciprocation. In the attempt to understand making, attention cannot stop at the object (the coat, the poem), for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers. The woman making the coat, for example, has no interest in making a coat per se but in making someone warm: her skilled attention to threads, materials, seams, linings are all objectifications of the fact that she is at work to remake human tissue to be free of the problem of being cold. (307)

This is an extraordinary passage that suggests how radically Scarry is offering to reconceive making and material production. In the context of narrative, the indirection of the bodily lever means that the image of disembodiment is not an end in itself, but rather a means by which corporeality can be transformed for the reader and author. As we have seen, corporeality raises fundamental questions about the nature of the authority of the speaker in narrative. Such corporeal levers do not necessarily create a disembodied speaker—although they may do this—but more


generally work to transform the conditions of authority and corporeality, to remake the narrative situation as a site where authority is not an issue. Scarry is not directly speaking about literature, and certainly not offering a theory of narration. Nonetheless, we can consider whether narratives themselves, in creating a dialectic between embodiment and disembodiment, might not similarly be working to transform our experience of the body. If this were the case, we could say that the experience of narrative literally remakes the world in the same way that sitting in a chair does— not by offering some new reality, but by relieving a certain experience of bodily weight and allowing that weight to be transferred elsewhere and experienced through a kind of textual lever. In suggesting that this might be the case, I am claiming that narration ultimately performs a kind of aesthetic function entirely distinct from whatever it represents or any kind of information that it provides. Critics have long recognized that the very principle of narration is founded on praxis and the explicit attempt to manipulate the reader to some end. Garrett Stewart has recently argued that we can read the history of the modern British novel as an attempt to define and organize reader agency. Stewart notes that interpellating references to readers are a staple of the novel from its inception through the nineteenth century, and functions as a way to educate the population about how to receive a genre that remained for a long time confusing and scandalous for good British middle-class citizens. Indeed, Stewart traces this tradition, much as I have, back to the break from medieval narrative. Such references are, he suggests, “the postmedieval lineage of that most common form of interpolated literary attention, the direct address to a textual audience, [where] we should find use for a broader account of literary apostrophe, not limited to reader invocation, as a tactic for the annexation of receptive consciousness to textual subjectivity.”38 Stewart specifically suggests that to understand such asides and apostrophes we must recognize that behind them is a “theory of such a reading agency” (27). It is my suggestion here in this concluding section of this chapter that we can understand the kind of reader agency that Stewart describes in terms of the transformation of embodiment. I would like to make this link by turning to a novel thematizes narration and embodiment— Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera introduces the issue of “weighty” events on the first page of the novel, where he explains the opposition that he will weave throughout the novel: Putting it negatively, the myth of the eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow,

embodiment and lightness in narration / 181 without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment. Will the war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century itself be altered if it recurs again and again, in eternal return? It will: it will become a solid mass, permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.39

Kundera associates repetition with weight, uniqueness with lightness. The title, of course, repeats this opposition, describing the existential attempt to understand life as without “weighty” design or meaning: “he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions” (222). In many ways, Kundera is picking up on traditional—even cliché—ideas about “weighty” ideas and considering how we come to experience textual weight. The body for Kundera is neither naturally weighty or light, but rather achieves these qualities through the human attempt to give meaning to individual lives. Kundera’s heroine Tereza sees the repetitious or nonindividual body as meaningless. Tereza remains obsessed with the fear that her body is allowed to define her, and that this body is simply one among others: “Your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. In her mother’s world all bodies were the same and marched behind one another in formation. Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation” (57). As a result, throughout the novel she insists that the soul transforms her body into something both unique and meaningful. Late in the novel she recognizes exactly this complication when considering the dying body of her dog, Karenin: “Why is it that a dog’s menstruation made her lighthearted and gay, while her own menstruation made her squeamish? The answer seems simple to me: dogs were never expelled from Paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust. That is why Tereza felts so free and easy with him” (297). Weightiness here is created by Tereza because of her insistence on seeing a gap between body and soul. The dog’s body, free from this duality, lacks a concern for uniqueness and yet is light precisely because of that. We can say, then, that the very issue of weightiness and


lightness is produced by Tereza out of the insistence on soul and meaning. In other words, to search for meaning through a narrative is to create the tension between embodiment and disembodiment, weight and lightness. The ironies of narrative weight should not come as a surprise to us, since we have seen throughout that narratives necessarily tell their stories by creating different degrees of embodiment. More specifically, we can say that events become weighty when they are inserted into a narrative that seeks to create some non-corporeal, weightless position within that story. Tereza desires a weightlessness, desires to find some way to inhabit a light position within her own life: “She knew that she had become a burden to [Tomas]: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell” (143). Precisely what launches Tereza into the dialectic of lightness and heaviness is her desire to escape from the body. This body, in turn, can be escaped according to her only by transforming the dramatic anonymity of repetition and necessary causality into another narrative of ephemerality and transitoriness. She finds, of course, that any attempt to constitute a story in which she functions “lightly” is marked by drama and weight. Tereza’s problem is not only psychological of course—as Kundera makes clear—but metaphysical. The very attempt to construct a narrative inserts her into this dialectic in a way that Karenin’s life can never be. Kundera suggests that it is impossible to understand a narrative without imagining some uniqueness to it. The pure repetition that Tereza imagines as a child or that she sees in Karenin is no narrative at all; only when we begin to struggle to understand what is unique within these events do we begin to tell a story. The uniqueness that Tereza unhappily insists upon in her narrative can be understood, I think, as a natural part of narrative. This is what Kundera is getting at, in part, when he notes that we cannot ever judge choices, since we never live out the implications of each option. We are caught within a particular point of view that always evaluates each choice from within that narrative, not from outside it. A sense of inevitability is natural, Kundera seems to suggest, to living within time. It is impossible to escape that inevitability in an animal-like way. Rather, narrative means being caught between lightness and weight as we shuffle between an awareness of the causality of events and the particular perspective from which we view them in time. Kundera touches on this concern for the perspective from which events are viewed in the way that he characterizes


Tomas, the figure for Tereza of escape from the dialectic of uniqueness and uniformity. Tomas is both a surgeon and an obsessive adulterer. Kundera explores the relation between these two aspects of this character: Tomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that onemillionth part; he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex. (Here too, perhaps, his passion for surgery and his passion for women came together. Even with his mistresses, he could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since he longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open.) We may ask, of course, why he sought that millionth part dissimilarity in sex and nowhere else. Why couldn’t he find it, say, in a woman’s gait or culinary caprices or artistic taste? To be sure, the millionth part dissimilarity is present in all areas of human existence, but in all areas other than sex it is exposed and needs no one to discover it, needs no scalpel. (200)

Tomas repetitiously searches for uniqueness, an irony that confirms the tensions within narrative throughout the novel. This irony seems far less troubling for him than for Tereza, I think, because he seems so much more aware and comfortable with his position in the act of discovery. As Kundera makes clear at the end of this passage, Tomas equates sexual experience with the search for uniqueness precisely because it gives him an active position within the process. I have suggested that precisely this position is what organizes the irony of narrative throughout the novel, and which makes it impossible for Tereza ever to find a stable way to understand her own uniqueness. Kundera’s novel suggests that narrative creates the dynamic between embodiment and disembodiment as an expression of reader agency. Tomas’s understanding of narrative and embodiment is a result of his recognition of this agency within this process—his acceptance that, ultimately, it is he who is creating meaning, uniqueness, weight, and lightness. By implication we can say that narrative always works to organize reader agency to transform human embodiment. A story in this sense, becomes a way of temporarily transforming our experience of our bodies—not simply by some form of mimesis that allows us to take on some other “skin” or to live a different sense of embodiment represented within a story, but by lifting a certain weight from our shoulders and transferring it to a textual figure with whom we have a very different relationship, and whose “weight” we will experience in different ways.


Just as the chair does not cancel our weight, so too does narrative still continue to insist upon this weight in its altered form. Kundera, after all, clearly recognizes that stories, events, and characters will continue to be “weighty” and to make a claim upon us to special attention even after we have adopted a relatively disembodied position while reading. Every story transforms our bodies into an embodiment, shaped, levered, and manipulated within a text.

CONCLUSION Redefining Narrative

At the outset of this book I noted the problem of historicizing narrative bodies. Throughout we have seen that much of the best work on the body in narrative is historicist in nature. Indeed, many of the books that I have drawn on repeatedly throughout this study—Lynch’s work on character bodies, Armstrong on domestic fiction, Gallagher on circulation— might well be considered anti-narratological by virtue of their insistence on the specific historical conditions of the narratives that they are studying. If narratology has traditionally sought universal principles and modes for narrative, then the kind of historical context that I have drawn on so frequently makes this project inevitably hybrid. The question at end of this book, then, must surely be whether this is a productive or disabling hybridity. In the introduction I suggested that we should view narrative as a moderately historical concept. I argued there that while narrative reflects particular historical conditions in how it became an object of study and in how it is given cultural meaning at different moments, it nonetheless describes a type of discourse that transcends a number of specific historical manifestations from some point in the late Renaissance up to the present day. At a number of places throughout this study I have connected the qualities that narratologists attribute to narrative to ideas and beliefs that emerged at particular historical moments. Chapter 1 described the role of possibility and biological assumptions about human identity necessary to thinking about narrative as a “possible world” mimetically linked to the real world. Chapter 2 noted the specific ways in which characters are spatialized and linked to modern thinking about human isolation. Chapter 5 argued that narration reflects the conditions of authority of written textuality that becomes dominant only after the medieval period. In all of these ways, the assumptions at work within our basic narrative terms depend on modern ways of thinking about discourse, culture, and the body.


The emergence of narrative as a critical concept needs to be historicized not only in terms of changes in thinking about discourse and identity occurring during the Renaissance and early modern period, but also in terms of the atmosphere of academic criticism that created the concept of “narratology” in the middle of the twentieth century. At several points throughout this project I have argued that narratology has treated character, event, and plot in particular ways because of the modern ideas about the body that are latent within it. The best example of this is the way that the alienated body defines the space in which narratology has traditionally described character—as a series of mutually exclusive, spatially separated contrasts. From the perspective of chapter 2, and of this book in general, critics have imagined narrative in terms that reflect the cultural ideas and biases of the twentieth century. This should be no surprise, except that narratology has always claimed to be describing categories that apply to narrative ahistorically. Indeed, narratology is perhaps the discipline within literary theory that has most aggressively sought out transhistorical and transcultural textual patterns and dynamics. When I suggest that narrative reflects the modern body I am not, of course, suggesting that people did not tell stories before the early modern period, or that we cannot describe some of the texts that they produced as “narratives.” I am suggesting, however, that as soon as we move from the general task of telling stories to the specific types of analysis that we associate with narratology (of character, plot, world, and so on) we narrow the scope of what we think of as narrative textuality in a way that reflects the modern body. It is easy to see the historical bias at work in the most influential texts of early narratology. Wayne Booth’s seminal The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) is typical if somewhat more explicit than most. We will recall that Booth’s study is argumentatively positioned against modernist dogmas about the importance of “showing” over “telling” inherited from writers like James and Hemingway. Booth’s method in this study is to contextualize the aesthetic goals of these modernist writers within the long tradition of narrative literature. As he writes in the preface to the first edition, My subject is the technique of non-didactic fiction, viewed as the art of communicating with readers—the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader. Though the problems raised by rhetoric in this sense are found in didactic works like Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress, and 1984, they are seen more clearly in non-didactic works like Tom Jones, Middlemarch, and Light in August.

redefining narrative / 187 Is there any defense that can be offered, on aesthetic grounds, for an art full of rhetorical appeals? What kind of art is it that will allow Flaubert to barge into his action to describe Emma as “unaware that now she was eager to yield to the very thing that had made her so indignant,” and as “totally unconscious that she was prostituting herself ”? Whatever their answers, critics have often been troubled by this kind of overt, distinguishable rhetoric. But it takes no very deep analysis to show that the same problems are raised, though in less obvious form, by the disguised rhetoric of modern fiction.1

Booth’s suggestion that the aesthetic problems faced by these modern writers are essentially the same faced by Swift or Fielding has seemed to most critics over the last forty years to be convincing and productive. Nonetheless, it should be clear that Booth is working to create an object of study—narrative fiction. He has projected backward to the eighteenth century and before, to the epic and to Biblical narrative, in order to be able to account for textual dynamics evident in his contemporary writing. What is remarkable about this rather mundane observation about the historical specificity of Booth’s project is that very few critics made it or have used it to think about the way that we do narratology.2 This is what I have tried to do in this book, albeit often in indirect ways. In focusing on the body in narrative theory I have tried to suggest how specific historical conditions influence our definition of narrative while nonetheless giving narratology credit for those elements of textuality that it is able to illuminate across cultures and periods. Along the way we have seen that some narrative concepts are more historically limited than others. While I was able to draw on a wide variety of texts in discussing space and plot—going back to the Odyssey and to The Divine Comedy— other categories like narrative world and characterization reflected the conditions of the modern body and modern narrative more strictly. The body is ideal for this task because it is shared by every culture, and yet invested by those cultures in very different ways. In this context we might recall the claim made by Mary Douglas in describing “natural symbols” produced through the body. As I noted in chapter 2, this paradoxical phrase suggests that the body is inevitably invested with meaning (and hence “natural”) but that those meanings are very much cultural (and hence “symbols”). The same is true when we consider the narrative representation of the body, which likewise is very historically specific all the while circling around a series of representational paradoxes that define how the body will be given meaning in any one narrative. The modern body in this sense exerts an influence on modern


narrative that is relatively cohesive, and that shapes that narrative in a few general ways. Over and over again this study has ended up defining narrative in terms of circulation. Circulation emerged most explicitly in chapter 4 in the discussion of narrative space. There we saw that the body forced narrative to always imagine space as a movement, since the body could never simply occupy its present position, but instead always gestured toward other spaces into which it might move—physically, imaginatively, or perceptually. As we moved into the final chapter on narration, it became increasingly clear that circulation could be used to describe the most characteristic features of the body in narrative in general. In chapter 2, I noted that the body provides a figure for thinking about textual hermeneutics. The relationship between text, author, and reader was imagined through a “general body” that defined the way in which individual characters and bodies within these narratives could be interpreted. In narration we likewise saw that such general bodies could be used to think about the place of the observer within a narrative. I went so far as to suggest that the concept of the body politic itself is ultimately narrative in the sense that it imagines a space of action and circulation for the purpose of defining how an object or event should be viewed. Circulation here describes the way that bodies provide a figure for thinking about interpretive interaction—the transfer between author, reader, and text. It should not be a surprise that the body is able to function as this type of transitional figure. Throughout this study we have noted that writers and philosophers have seen in the body an ability to establish contact between individuals and elements. This was clearest chapter 2, where I used Elizabeth Grosz’s articulation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of bodily “touch” to describe the general body. Bodies touch, Grosz argues, and in doing so they define a fundamentally different relationship between themselves and the outside world than models built around non-corporeal objects do. Indeed, most theories of textual hermeneutics mistakenly take this latter, “objective” approach, starting from the assumption that an interpretive theory must describe how the passive and static object of the text becomes meaningful to different people, often in different ways. In the corporeal theory that Grosz provides and that I have applied to narrative, hermeneutics is always a matter of defining first and foremost the point of “touch” between text and reader, the way in which we are offered or create a point of ingress to the text. Such a corporeal hermeneutics is, I think, the most compelling discovery of this theory of narrative, and the point at which the model of bodily circulation that I have described has the broadest application. Ultimately, this study

redefining narrative / 189

suggests, narrative is that type of textuality that thinks about hermeneutics in terms of circulation. In the process, this corporeal theory of narrative hermeneutics as circulation helps to explain the connections between the various definitions that narrative has had in the past. I would note two competing definitions. The first, and most common, has been cited many times throughout this study: narrative is a change in state over time. It is Didier Coste’s expression of this definition that I drew upon in chapters 2 and 4: “An act of communication is narrative whenever and only when imparting a transitive view of the world is the effect of the message produced.”3 From this perspective, narrative describes how something becomes something else. The second, somewhat less common definition describes narrative in terms of the drama of narrating itself. As Patrick O’Neill remarks in Fictions of Discourse, “The most fundamental concept of modern narratology is that of narrative ‘levels.’ For the most naïve reader there is only one ‘level’ of narrative: how the narrative is recounted is only incidental to what ‘actually happened.’ . . . The fundamental discrimination upon which all modern narratological theory is founded, however . . . is precisely that between the two ‘levels’ of story and discourse, between ‘what really happened’ (the content of the narrative) and ‘how what really happened is told’ (the expression of the narrative).”4 That is, narrative is that form of discourse in which the act of telling is evident, and where we must constantly ask (unlike O’Neill’s naïve reader) both what we know and how we know it. Narrative from this perspective stages a number of textual “levels”—the author, narrator, narratee, implied reader—that are muted in other forms of discourse. What holds these definitions of narrative together is the idea of transaction—of touch and circulation. At the end of chapter 2, I noted how the idea of change over time implied a drama of touch—the interaction between characters that produces the change. Indeed, Coste makes this explicit when he describes this change as the transitive view of the world—the movement between two states. This is even more important in the second definition of narrative, since the interaction between author, narrator, narratee and reader is much more explicitly a matter of transmission and interaction. In a very direct way narratives stage the circulation of text and contact. This circulation is what Fredric Jameson has in mind when he describes interpretation as a matter of transcoding, as translating meanings of one type or on one level of text into meanings of another type or on another level.5 We witness the same process in every narrative as the narrator struggles to give meaning to the raw events that we glimpse within the text. As readers, we in turn enter


into that process of circulation by further transcoding that meaning through interpretation. All this is to suggest that working within narratological definitions of narrative is a notion of circulation that can be traced back to the central role of the body in these narratives. This idea of circulation arises at a particular historical moment because of the way in which our definitions of the body and human identity change, and in the process provides the basis for a way of thinking about discourse. When narratologists look back from their contemporary perspective to define the tradition of narrative—at times too broadly, as I have suggested—it is always from this modern body, which defines the power and the limitations of narrative.

Notes

Preface 1. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Signet, 1968), p. 55. 2. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 29. 3. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), p. 98.

Introduction

Narrative’s Lost Body

1. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 2. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 4. 3. Alan Hyde, Bodies of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 6. 4. See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966); F.K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goedsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 5. Gerald Prince, “On Narratology: Criteria, Corpus, Context,” Narrative 3 (1995), p. 75. 6. James Phelan’s rhetorical study of character criticizes structuralist narratology precisely because it fails to produce rich interpretations: “By identifying the basic elements, the structuralist can indicate something about the materials out of which the mimetic analysis will build his account, but such an indication comes at the price of failing to offer any well-developed interpretation of its own” (Reading People, Reading Plots; Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], p. 7).

192 / notes

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

More generally Gerald Prince has suggested that “the most consistently applied an applicable criterion [for narrative theory] is that of productivity” (“On Narratology,” p. 77). Although Prince would claim that narratological concepts can be productive in many different ways, Phelan suggests how often in American criticism productivity is equated with the ability to produce rich individual readings. Another important reason that we should note for narratology’s disregard of the body is this discipline’s continuing insistence that it is objective, scientific, and ahistorical. Despite poststructuralist and historicist debates raging throughout the academe during the last two decades, narratology in many ways has continued to hold to a very old-fashioned goal of describing textual categories that apply equally well to all narrative texts. An excellent example of this continuing urge to see narratology as scientific is Nilli Diengott’s response to Susan Lanser’s call for feminist narratology, “Narratology and Feminism” (Style 22.1 [1988], pp. 42–51). Also see Robyn Warhol’s discussion of feminist narratology in “Guilty Cravings: What Feminist Narratology Can Do for Cultural Studies” (Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999], pp. 340–55). Susan Lanser, “Toward A Feminist Narratology,” Style 20 (1986), p. 343. Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 4. Robyn R. Warhol, Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 32–33. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. xiii. Kathy Mezei, “Who is Speaking Here? Free Indirect Discourse, Gender, and Authority in Emma, Howards End, and Mrs. Dalloway,” Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 66–92. Warhol, “Guilty Cravings,” p. 348. Warhol, Gendered Interventions, pp. 18–19. Mieke Bal, “The Point of Narratology,” Poetics Today 11 (1990), p. 278. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism,” Poetics Today 6 (1985), p. 47. Suleiman remarks that Angela Carter’s novel breaks from traditional narrative: “Carter succeeds in producing a new kind of writing even while remaining within the bounds of a certain ‘traditional’ narrative logic. Whereas Cixous and Wittig innovate by refusing linear narrative, and by systematically fragmenting their texts, Carter multiplies the possibilities of linear narrative so that what results is a dizzying accumulation” (61). Suleiman does not, however, follow up this suggestive description with a narratological analysis of Carter’s understanding of plot or narration. An example of the extremes of this choice is Sander Gilman’s study, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” (Critical Inquiry 12

notes / 193

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

[1985], pp. 204 – 42), which focuses on the symbolic function of various types of racialized bodies largely at the expense of interest in the narrative manipulation of these bodies; and Robert Stepto’s “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives” (Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 300–22), which focuses on the narrative manipulation of written tales largely at the expensive of the bodies represented by those tales. This comparison is not entirely parallel to what we can observe in feminist narratology because Gilman’s essay, like much of the best work on the representation of the body, is historicist in a way that escapes some of the dynamics of narratology, as we will see later. Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 143. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977). On this point, see Michel de Certeau’s analysis of historical change in Foucault. De Certeau sees the key concepts analyzed by Foucault as “soft categories that do not determine their content, but only cover it: concepts capable of embracing contradictory terms, floating signifiers in which past fears and perspectives persist” (Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], p. 180). Of course, even scientific studies are marked by traditional assumptions and their social context, which tends to interpret new discoveries to support older social models. For a good example of this in the context of inquiry into the body, see Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 171. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Noonday, 1982), p. 251.

1

Conceiving Modern Narrative

1. Amos Funkenstein makes the link between Vico’s contextualist history and Leibniz’s possible-world theology: “Indeed, with his distinction between possibility and compossibility, Leibniz had already developed the logical foundation of the concept of contextual harmony and made it a cornerstone of his metaphysics. If the predicate-in-motion principle is to be taken literally, the monads are contexts of attributes. Monads cluster into ‘possible worlds,’ inasmuch as they are, beyond their logical possibility, compossible on the grounds of the principle of sufficient reason. They are a logical, epistemological, but also aesthetic category of contextual unity” (Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986], p. 286). 2. This is, of course, only one of many ways to define the much discussed “rise of the novel.” On the Princess de Clèves as a forerunner of the modern novelistic conflict between “private lives and public stories,” see William Ray,

194 / notes

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the EighteenthCentury French and English Novel (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). Michael Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), p. 104, § 349. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 164. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 1. The term “segregationist” is Thomas Pavel’s. See Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), where Pavel discusses theories that seek to “segregate” and those that seek to “integrate” fictional reference into everyday speech and into general theories of reference. On the incompleteness of fictional entities, see Ruth Ronen, “Completing the Incompleteness of Fictional Entities,” Poetics Today 9 (1988), pp. 497–514. Robert Howell, “Fictional Objects: How they Are and How they Aren’t,” Poetics 8 (1979), p. 139. For a recent overview of debates about fictional objects and paraphrase see Charles Crittenden, Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 40. Kripke notes that if any information about a person is to be useful and can be considered a “fact,” it might be false (72). Thus, any statement about a person that meets the requirements of necessity (e.g., “John is a person”) is nearly circular. Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Avon Books, 1971), p. 80. G.W. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p. 41. A wonderful example of the conflict between possible-world thinking and a belief in divine planning is a story, attributed to Kilgore Trout, inserted into Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Jailbird (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979). In this story, Einstein dies and arrives in heaven, where he discovers that one of the conditions of being admitted into the Kingdom is submitting to an “audit” in which candidates are shown how many chances they had to be happy and, especially, wealthy, had they not failed to grasp some opportunity. After being forced to admit that he had been “asleep at the switch” and being admitted to Heaven, Einstein notes, much to the displeasure of God, that the math of these possible worlds does not add up: “He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work” (187). Vonnegut

notes / 195

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

here shows the clash between possible-world thinking and a faith that God moves the universe toward the best possible end. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: Modern Library, 1953), p. 504. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Penguin, 1965), p. 35. In fact, many critics have suggested that the modern novel is inherently linked to the search for such genealogical origins. See, e.g., Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender, and Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). In the context of prenatal care, Susan Bordo notes in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) that American society thinks of fetal health entirely in terms of physiological rather than environmental and emotional factors. Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife (New York: Harperflamingo, 1998), p. 200. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 84. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 161. C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 36. Albert Russell Ascoli, “The Vowels of Authority (Dante’s Convivio IV. vi 3–4),” Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), p. 25. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989), p. 112. Jane H.M. Taylor, “The Sense of a Beginning: Genealogy and Plentitude in Late Medieval Narrative Cycles,” Transtextualities: Of Cycles and Cyclicity in Medieval French Literature, ed. Sara Strum-Maddox and Donald Maddox (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996), p. 96. William W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 9. Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 12. H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If ”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925). See Alan Bewell, “An Issue of Monstrous Desire: Frankenstein and Obstetrics,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1988), pp. 105–28. Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in EighteenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 121–22. Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/My Self,” Diacritics 12.2 (Summer 1982), p. 7. Qtd. Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), vol. II, p. 731. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 113–15; 729b 15–23.

196 / notes 35. Galen, of course, moves away from Aristotle’s insistence that men provide no material substance in conception. Galen ends his essay, “The Construction of the Embryo” without any conclusion to the issue of inheritance, leaving speculation on the shaping force of the child to debates about the nature of the soul. Precisely because of this belief in a non-corporeal soul that ultimately gives identity to the child, Galen is able to bracket off issues of generation from those of identity. See Galen, Selected Works, trans. P.N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 200–01. 36. See Joseph Needham’s History of Embryology, 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), which characterizes ancient embryological theories in general as denying either maternity or paternity (43). 37. F.J. Cole, Early Theories of Sexual Generation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 43. 38. Why this obvious fact had no stronger influence on theories of generation is a bit unclear, although there are several factors to take into account. We can trace all the way back to Aristotle the observation that inheritance often skips generations (Generation, p. 55; 722a 9). Likewise, belief in the power of the imagination to influence the fetus continues well through the eighteenth century to influence theory. The insistence of taking account of folktales is clear even in a casual discussion of sexual generation like that of Leibniz’s critique of Locke, where stories of “monstrous” births and analogies to the generation of plants lead Leibniz to conclude finally that scientists are in much “darkness” about such points (New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, trans. Alfred Gideon Langley, 3rd ed. [La Salle: Open Court, 1949], p. 347). 39. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi, p. 752. 40. Probably the most influential discussion of the metaphorical relations between body and cosmos is Leonard Barkan’s Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). 41. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 23. 42. Robert Silverberg, “Foreword,” Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, ed. Ellen Datlow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. xi. 43. Eve Keller notes, e.g., in her essay “Embryonic Individuals: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century Embryology and the Construction of Early-Modern Identity” (Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 [2000]) how the mechanical development of the fetus in theories of epigenesis is treated very differently in the ovist and animalcule theories, reflecting differences in thinking about the relative importance of activity or passivity to men or women (341). Also see Shirley Roe’s discussion of the philosophical baggage played out in debates about embryology in Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Probably the best-known recent work on the cultural meaning attributed to theories of sexual generation is Thomas Lacquer’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), which especially discusses the way in which scientific discoveries were recuperated to support existing notions of gender (see especially p. 171).

notes / 197 44. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 12. 45. As Lubomír Doleˇzel notes, “Fictional individuals are not dependent for their existence and properties on actual prototypes. . . . The identity of fictional individuals is protected by the boundary between the actual and the possible worlds” (“Mimesis and Possible Worlds,” Poetics today 9 [1988], pp. 482–83). 46. Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 22. 47. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 171. 48. François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1955), p. 74. 49. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. 135. 50. Lubomír Dole zˇel, “Extensional and Intensional Narrative Worlds,” Poetics 8 (1979), p. 196. 51. Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 32. 52. John O’Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 25. 53. Late in the story, Gregor begins to worry that he is beginning to think like a bug when he enjoys the space to crawl around once the room’s furniture is removed (“The Metamorphosis,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Frank Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzner [New York: Schocken Books, 1971], p. 116). Such a moment functions to show how Gregor has adapted to his circumstances—just as he adapted to his previous life of business drudgery—more than to suggest that he must somehow reimagine his identity as a bug. 54. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), p. 211. 55. Elaine K. Ginsburg, “Introduction: The Politics of Passing,” Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 4. 56. Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes the use of “reparenting” in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt as a narrative strategy in which “the return by the female hero to parental figures in order to forge an alternative fictional resolution to the oedipal crisis that those parent figures evoke” (Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], p. 83). Although extremely suggestive, DuPlessis’s reparenting occurs here at a far more symbolic level than the type of narrative situation that I am describing, and consequently does not raise the same problems of trans-world identity. 57. Valerie Rohy, “Displacing Desire: Passing, Nostalgia, and Giovanni’s Room,” Passing and the Fictions of Identity, p. 230. 58. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 162.

198 / notes 59. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150. 60. Robert Coover, “The Babysitter,” Pricksongs & Descants (New York: New American Library, 1969), pp. 206–39. 61. William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 25. 62. Steven Shaviro, “Two Lessons from Burroughs,” Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 40–1.

2

Sorted and General Character Bodies

1. W.J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 52. 2. David Lodge, Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 69. 3. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 118. 4. Lodge ties this language pattern specifically back to characters when he emphasizes that the novel is primarily about presenting “the subtle and complex life of a text” (80). For him, language is not exclusively connected to characters, but certainly works primarily through characters and the life that they dramatize. 5. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 126. 6. James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 3. 7. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. xxxi. 8. For the purposes of this chapter, I am equating semantic and thematic qualities of the text, treating both as the process by which elements of the text are inserted into a system of meaning. There are many ways to formulate this process, but the simple model that I have in mind is exemplified by Lubomír Doleˇzel in “Extensional and Intensional Narrative Worlds” (Poetics 8 [1979], pp. 193–211). Doleˇzel argues that narratives first define an “extensional” world of basic objects, and then set up an “intensional” world where these objects are inserted into a principle of “sense organization” (201). In equating thematic meaning with this type of semantic sorting, I am following Phelan’s use of “thematic” to describe an aspect of a characters that “supports some proposition or assertion allegedly made by [the author] through his text” (3). Thematics can, of course, be defined in other ways. See in particular Menachem Brinker’s argument that themes are necessarily intertextual, an issue that has no place within the simpler theory of narrative semantics that I am adopting here. See “Theme and

notes / 199

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Interpretation,” The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 21–37. Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 71. This contemporary struggle with the line between body and nonbody is especially clear in “cyberpunk” fiction. As a number of critics have noted, this Science Fiction about the internet, virtual reality, and electronically mediated communication frequently draws into question the degree to which characters should be attributed a concrete existence and distinguished from other objects to be bought and sold by multinational corporations. Describing the fiction that appears against this backdrop, Katherine Hayles theorizes a fundamental change in narrative and, especially, in character bodies: “The shift from presence and absence to pattern and randomness is encoded into every aspect of contemporary literature, from the physical object that constitutes the text to such staples of literary interpretation as character, plot, author, and reader. The development is by no means even; some texts testify dramatically and explicitly to the shift, whereas others manifest it only indirectly. I will call the texts where the displacement is most apparent information narratives. . . . Pattern tends to overwhelm presence, marking a new kind of immateriality which does not depend on spirituality or even consciousness, only on information” (“Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey [New York: Aperture, 1996], p. 267). Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), p. 736. Certainly this is Brian McHale’s reading of such border crossings in Pynchon’s writing, which he sees as typical of the postmodern interest in “ontological” instability, the conflict between textual worlds. See Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987). Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and The Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 43. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1973), p. 8. William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Richard the Third,” The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 239; I.i.20–21. For a good discussion of the tradition of seeing bodily “monstrosity” as a message from God, see Chris Baldick’s In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For an example of thinking about the healthy body in terms of hygiene, see Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture— from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), p. 17.

200 / notes 19. Ben Jonson, “Euery Man Out of His Humor,” Ben Jonson, vol. 3, ed. E.H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 431–32; Prologue ll. 98–114. 20. Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 239–40. 21. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), pp. 255–81. 22. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), e.g., models character interaction in bodily terms, but often in extremely metaphorical ways: “People are like lice—they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get permanently deloused” (12). 23. Although its Jungian model is problematic, Dennis Patrick Slattery’s claim that wounded bodies frequently figure the relationship between self and outside world suggests that these relationships will frequently be embodied as actual textual figures. See The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of the Flesh (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000). 24. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927), p. 96. 25. This is especially clear in the way that Mr. Ramsey’s presence “changed everything” in Lily’s painting (223), and demanded her sympathy (226) after Mrs. Ramsay’s death. 26. Frank Norris, “Fantaisie Printaniere,” Frank Norris of “The Wave”: Stories and Sketches from the San Francisco Weekly, 1893 to 1897 (San Francisco: Westgate Press, 1931), p. 64. 27. Lindon Barnett, “African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority,” American Literary History 7 (1995), p. 437. 28. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. xv. 29. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Signet, 1968), p. 76 30. Jean Fegan Yellin, “Introduction,” Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fegan Yellin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. xxviii. 31. This is especially puzzling, since it is a critical commonplace that character development is one of the principle markings of good storytelling. While some critics have noted the temporal emergence of character trait, very little of our character theory directly integrates time into the patterns of traits that we have been describing. 32. This passage is still referring explicitly to human relations with objects. At the outset of this next chapter, however, Harvey makes clear that what he has had to say about objects applies to characters when he remarks that “[t]he last chapter will at least have demonstrated the complexities inherent in even the simplest of human relationships” (52). 33. Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 64.

notes / 201 34. On this actantal model, see A.J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 35. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 256. 36. See in particular “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,” On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 48–62. 37. This is not to say that there are not some spatial descriptions of plot. In his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” essay, e.g., Barthes uses a diagram to describe the various possible actions that might result from other actions (A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag [New York: Noonday, 1982], pp. 251–95). Seymour Chatman repeats this sort of spatialization of plot by describing them as the contrast between “kernel” and “satellite” events (Story and Discourse, pp. 53–56). While popular within a certain area of narrative study, these distinctions do not have the kind of widespread currency to permeate critical discourse in the way that the spatialization of characters does. 38. Typical is Seymour Chatman’s summary of the nesting of the implied author/narrator/narratee/implied reader in Story and Discourse (256). 39. Stanzel’s summary diagram of the “typological circle” of narrative is an obvious exception, but this spatial model has had little influence on later critics discussing voice. See F.K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goedsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 40. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 131. 41. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989), p. 19. 42. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 161. 43. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), pp. 72–73. 44. James Phelan, “Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved,” Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches, ed. Nancy J. Peterson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 226–27; citing Deborah Horovitz, “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Depossession in Beloved,” Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989), p. 157. 45. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 97. 46. For a critique of the body simply as a “habitation,” see Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodimen, and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1994). 47. Grosz’s theory is even more explicit about this function of touch when she describes Merleau-Ponty’s complex theory of “flesh.” Grosz associates touching with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “flesh of the world,” which according to her is “being’s most elementary level. Flesh is being’s reversibility, its capacity to fold in on itself, a dual orientation inward and outward” (100).

48. A number of critics have formulated the relation between reader and character in psychoanalytic terms. One of the best is John Frow’s Lacanian account of reader inaction in terms of suturing—“of the binding-in of the reader to the text.” See John Frow, “Spectacle Binding: On Character,” Poetics Today 7 (1986), pp. 227–50. Although valid and in many ways similar to Grosz’s account, I would suggest that Frow’s theory represents only one way of thinking about corporeality—albeit one relevant to many narratives—and that other narratives might imagine corporeal interaction in other ways. 49. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 9. 50. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 5. 51. David G. Horn, “This Norm Which is Not One: Reading the Female Body in Lombroso’s Anthropology,” Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 110. 52. Hélèn Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 338. 53. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927), p. 130. 54. Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4. 55. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 1–25. 56. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 4.

3

Plot and the Unruly Body

1. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 7. 2. Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 39–40. 3. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 90. 4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 158. 5. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 2. 6. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977), p. 4.

notes / 203 7. M.M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austen: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 84. 8. Apuleius, The Tranformations of Lucius: Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Noonday, 1951), p. 73; ellipsis in the original. 9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélèn Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 318. 10. In their book on Bakhtin, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson go so far as to argue that Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais in Rabelais and His World is actually antichronotopic, since it emphasizes a general cosmic body severed from concrete individual locations and times (Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], p. 440). 11. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 115. 12. G.M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 44– 45. 13. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 3–4. 14. For a recent discussion of narrative and seduction, see Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), especially his summary of traditional accounts linking the novel and adultery as a means of narrative delay (pp. 10–11). 15. Indeed, a number of critics have suggested that Bakhtin’s work is split between the cosmological patterns that we observe in his Rabelais book, and the phenomenological theories first articulated in this early essays like “Art and Answerability” and best known from his work on dialogic interaction in Dostoevsky. For this argument, see Morson and Emerson’s Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin’s early work, see M.M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austen: University of Texas Press, 1990). For Bakhtin’s work on dialogism, see in particular Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 16. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 14–15. 17. This is Derrida’s argument in Speech and Phenomena, which argues that Husserl’s phenomenological attempt to imagine an internal “expression” distinct from the external means of “indicating” that idea to be expressed is simply another product of indication. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David. B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 18. Tamara K. Hareven, “Synchronizing Individual Time, Family Time, and Historical Time,” Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 167.

204 / notes 19. For an especially rich and interesting discussion of narrative and modern temporal regulation, see Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and the English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 20. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1946), pp. 104–05. 21. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 22. As Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish, “power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic position—an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated” (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage, 1995], pp. 26–27). 23. See, e.g., Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990): 39–62. 24. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 5. 25. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 97. 26. Frederic Jameson is, of course, the critic most associated with the need for “cognitive mapping” in contemporary space. See Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 347–57. 27. We should recognize, of course, that not all theories of practice work on exactly this split. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus as a “world of already realized ends—procedures to follow, paths to take—and of objects endowed with a ‘permanent teleological character,’ in Husserl’s phrase, tools or institutions” (The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], p. 53) associates practice with the structures and overall social pattern. Although the impetus is much the same as we saw in Foucault—to think social structure through everyday action— the resulting model does not emphasize a gap between overall and unruly bodies and is thus not narrative. 28. A number of critics have noted that the very distinction between “story” and “discourse,” the events of the narrative and the plot that narrates them, is a construction. See, e.g., Jonathan Culler’s discussion of the distinction between “story” and “discourse” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 169–87. The path of the implied reader’s movement through the text is of course even more strongly a narratological construction. A number of critics have noted that “story” itself must always be reconstructed from the “discourse” (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics [London: Methuen, 1983], p. 7), while others have observed that “iterative” or “everyday” events are always partially fictitious constructions from discrete events (see Sherman, Telling Time, p. 225).

notes / 205 29. Jane Tompkins’s “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism” in her influential collection, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to PostStructuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) notes these problems as well as the practical advantages of Wolfgang Iser’s method, which is the best example of this type of response criticism: Iser “does not grant the reader autonomy or even partial independence from textual constraints. The reader’s activity is only a fulfillment of what is already implicit in the structure of the work—though exactly how that structure limits his activity is never made clear. Iser’s phenomenology of the reading process, with its movement from anticipation to retrospection, its making and unmaking of gestalts . . . provides critics with a new repertoire of interpretive devices and thus brings to light a new set of facts for observation and description” (xv). 30. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 118. 31. For a discussion of the importance of practical interpretation within response criticism, see Terry Beers, “Reading Reading Constraints: Conventions, Schemata, and Literary Interpretation,” Diacritics 18.4 (Winter 1988): 82–93. 32. Lest we assume that this language of horizon is simply a natural description of the temporality of reading, we should recall the observation made by Matei Calinescu that response criticism always speaks about reading from the perspective of rereading (Rereading [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993]). This is always an imagined temporality and thus an imagined physical limitation. We might go a step further and note Nelson Goodman’s argument that even basic physical facts like perspective in painting are always imagined according to a certain notion of what is an appropriate amount of distortion to signal physical positioning. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 16. Goodman makes clear than even basic physical facts about the position from which a subject is viewed are structured according to conventions about how bodily position should and should not shape a painter’s image. 33. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983); Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). 34. John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse,” Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (New York: Anchor, 1988), p. 77.

4

The Body and Kinetic Space

1. See Seymour Chatman’s discussion of filmic setting in Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 96–101. Gerald Prince follows the pattern set down by Chatman in Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin:

206 / notes

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Mouton, 1982) where he treats setting primarily as a matter of revealing information about the narrator (p. 33). Carl E. Bain, Jerome Beaty, J. Paul Hunter, “Setting,” The Norton Introduction to Literature, 6th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), pp. 148–50. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 74. See Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture— from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 89. Dorritt Cohn, “Optics and Power in the Novel,” New Literary History 26 (1995), p. 5. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 249–50. Elaine Scarry, Resisting Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 75. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), p. 56; Gibson’s ellipsis. Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” Mississippi Review 47/48 (1988), p. 226. This is not, of course, to suggest that Ronen is the only critic to have observed these sorts of frames—only that she has most fully articulated it. Also see Mieke Bal’s discussion of space in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), which does discuss both movement between places and the cultural context for the valuation of different types of locations (pp. 132–38). Ruth Ronen, “Space in Fiction,” Poetics Today 7.3 (1986), p. 423. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (New York: Penguin, 1965), pp. 35–36. William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark,” The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 954, V.i.59. Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 111; citing Lubomír Doleˇzel, “Narrative Modalities,” Journal of Literary Semantics 5.1 (1976), p. 7. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural World of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 175–76. Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants,” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 213. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), pp. 228–29. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, trans. Robin Buss (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 117. On the spatializing of the pregnant body, see Alan Hyde’s Bodies of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), which notes that rights are regularly treated as spaces (82–83). In general, note Hyde’s claim that a

notes / 207

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

“right to bodily integrity” would be a stronger basis for individual protection than a “right to privacy” (5). Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (New York: Signet, 1968), p. 76. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1983), p. 29. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), p. 222. Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 12. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 1999), p. 49. Vonnegut describes the philosophy behind these jumps: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance” (Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade [New York: Delacorte Press, 1969], p. 23). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 45. See Susan Bordo’s discussion of prenatal imagining techniques in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 85–86. Fanny Burney, Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), p. 87. Dante Alighieri, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, The Florentine: Cantica III, Paradise, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (New York: Penguin, 1962), pp. 343–44; Canto XXXIII, ll. 22–33. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927), p. 201. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989), p. 89. Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4. Darko Suvin, “On Metaphoricity and Narrativity in Fiction: The Chronotope as the Differentia Generica,” Substance 48 (1986), p. 61. An interesting piece of evidence for the link between body and narrative setting are theories of description as narrative. In “Descriptive Limits” (Yale French Studies 61 [1981]), Jeffrey Kittay notes how difficult it is to distinguish narrative and description, especially since both “must inevitably be discussed in spatial terms’ (226). This observation, I think, we can trace back to Kittay’s insistence on the bodily quality of moving around the object of description: “The percipient can also trace with his eye a parcours, one that a surface itself may suggest, as it often has lines of possible relationships and, of course, a frame. We must note however that this ‘trip’ is a closed one, ultimately reaffirming the frame as closure, the surface as limit. It is a trip that always has an ‘about-ness’ to it, the de- of description. A surface is circumscribed and in

208 / notes

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

a related way circumscribes its participant” (229). Here description becomes narrativized precisely by emphasizing the way that narrator’s body structures it. Catherine Gallagher, “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 84. Jonathan Gil Harris, “This is Not a Pipe: Water Supply, Incontinent Sources, and the Leaky Body Politic,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 205. See, e.g., Sally Shuttleworth, “Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era,” Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 47–68. Shuttleworth examines the treatment of menstrual flow and its conflicts with control and social space. See also Ann Louise Kibbie, “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana,” PMLA 110 (1995), pp. 1,023–34. Kibbie discusses the circulation of capital itself and the ambiguous way in which it is represented as incestuous and monstrous. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 574. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 75.

5

Embodiment and Lightness in Narration

1. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 1. 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 3. Water Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 87. 4. See Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 5. For a discussion of the transition between oral and written appeals to authority during the medieval period, see Robert Weimann, “Memory, Fictionality, and the Issue of Authority: Author-function, and Narrative Performance in Beowulf, Chrétien and Malory,” Contexts of Pre-Novel Narrative: The European Tradition, ed. Roy Eriksen (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 83–100. 6. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 29. 7. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 19.

notes / 209 8. Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 30. 9. Lynch, Economy of Character, p. 82; citing Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in which are included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, ed. James L. Clifford, rev. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 18. 10. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. xvi–xvii. 11. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 27. For a similar discussion of female positioning as applied to written narratives, see Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 12. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 574. 13. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 195. 14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 5. 15. This representational paradox is suggested by Leonard Barkan when he remarks that “a vision of man in society making use of the human body analogy is likely to have a roughly hourglass-shaped structure. Society, seen as basically multiple and fragmented, is imaged forth by the diversity of the human body and at the same time unified by that image. The single body of society is analogous to or even identical with the body of the monarch, which is, in its ideal form, single and unified. But the monarch is himself fragmented by his public and private torments, and his fragmentation is in turn imaged forth by a diversification and multiplication of his own body, a process which makes him all the more analogous to the multiple body of the State” (Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975], pp. 95–96). 16. Tobias Smollett, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, ed. Peter Wagner (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 46. 17. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Modern Library, 1992), p. 89. 18. Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 49. 19. Amy Schrager Lang, “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy,” The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 132. 20. Lang, “Strategies of Sympathy,” p. 132; citing Rebecca Hardin Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1972), pp. 12 and 14. 21. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly, ed. Ann Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 592.

210 / notes 22. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 49. 23. Robyn R. Warhol, “As You Stand, So You Feel and Are: The Crying Body and the Nineteenth-Century Text,” Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text, ed. Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 100. 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 8. 25. Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 17. 26. Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 270. 27. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 118. 28. Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 6. 29. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 215. 30. A good example of this scientific assumption within narratology arose around Susan Lanser’s call for a feminist narratology, discussed in the introduction to this book. See in particular Nilli Diengott’s insistence on the scientific basis of narratology in her response to Lanser, “Narratology and Feminism,” Style 22 (1988), pp. 42–51. 31. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 29. 32. On the gap between corporeality and the point from which it must be viewed, see also Catherine Gallagher, “The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part 3, ed. Michael Feher, Ramona Naddaff, Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 345–65. Gallagher specifically argues that in this novel “the value of Life itself, is only discoverable from some vantage point outside of the body” (355). 33. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, rev. ed. (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), p. 21. 34. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 223. 35. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (New York: Penguin, 1946), p. 51. 36. Although the technique may strike us as unusual, we can also see it at work in that other classic of unreliable narration, Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.” Again in this case, it is precisely the narrator’s ability to withhold all physical signs of his loathing of his victim, Fortunato, and to be untouched by the physical horror that he is inflicting upon him in walling him up in the catacombs that signals that we are to distrust the speaker’s opinions. See Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado,” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 274–79. 37. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 290.

notes / 211 38. Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in NineteenthCentury British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 27. 39. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 3–4.

Conclusion

Redefining Narrative

1. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. xiii. 2. Typical, I think, is Gerald Prince’s otherwise helpful overview, “On Narratology (Past, Present, Future)” (French Literature Series XVII [1990], pp. 1–14). Prince is quite sensitive to the disciplinary structure of narratology (“the very domain of narratology is in constant flux and the discipline keeps on changing as its boundaries are (re)drawn” [5]) and explains quite well the tensions and limits within current narrative models. Nowhere, however, does the essay discuss the emergence of the study of narrative as itself an object of historical inquiry. 3. Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4. 4. Patrick O’Neill, Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 19–20. 5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 43.


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Index

1984 (Orwell), 132–3, 186 Abbott, Edwin, 134 Abjection, 107 Accident, genetic combination as, 11, 36, 39, 40, 41, 68 Adelmann, Howard, 38–9 The Adventures of a Bank-Note (Bridges), 161 Aesthetics, 14, 145–8 Agency, 111–12, 159 Alexander the Great, 22 Alien sex, 40 Alienation in modern characterization, 69, 72, 80 Allegory, 72 An American Tragedy (Dreiser), 25 Anaxagoras, 36 Anderson, Benedict, 150 Angel, 59 Animalculism, 38 The Antelope Wife (Erdrich), 29 Antigone (Sophocles), 59 Apuleius, 96–9, 102 Archetypal criticism, 12 Aristotle, 21–2, 32, 36, 103, 196n35, 196n38 Armstrong, Nancy, 99–100, 169–70, 185 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 31 Aspects of narrative, 3, 4, 5, 117 Auerbach, Erich, 42, 43, 152–3 Augustine, Saint, 103–4 Austen, Jane, 5

Authority in narrative, 14, 15, 32, 33–4, 149–57, 174–8, 185, 208n5 and objectivity, 152 Authorship, 31, 116, 119 The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (Johnson), 46–7 “The Babysitter” (Coover), 50 Back to the Future, 27–9 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 94–9, 102, 170–1, 172, 203n10, 203n15 Bal, Mieke, 3, 55–6, 72, 206n11 Baldick, Chris, 199n17 Baldwin, James, 47 Banfield, Ann, 172 Baptism, 25–9, 49 Barchester Towers (Trollope), 63 Barkan, Leonard, 196n40, 209n15 Barnett, Lindon, 66 Barth, John, 115–16 Barthes, Roland, 10, 201n37 Beauvoir, Simone de, 66 Beer, Gillian, 40 Beers, Terry, 205n31 Behn, Aphra, 61 Beloved (Morrison), 73–5, 76–7, 80, 81, 83, 145, 163 Bender, John, 60, 120 Benjamin, Walter, 150–1 Bewell, Alan, 195n30 Bhabha, Homi, 149–50 Bible, 152–3

226 / index Bildungsroman, 7, 101 Birkerts, Sven, viii, ix Birth, 25–9, 35–6, 49 Blazon, 167 Bloom, Harold, vii Bluest Eye (Morrison), 48 Body animate and inanimate, 59 aristocratic, 99 bodily “material,” 36, 37, 93 bodily needs, 87 and city, 64 cosmic body, 98–9, 196n40 criminal, 78–9 dead, 59 as distinct object, 72 fragmentation, 92–4 gendered, 7, 196n43 general bodies, 77–83, 90, 92, 101, 107, 116 health and illness, 61–2, 118, 199n17 humours, 62–3 individual bodies, viii, 6, 91–2, 101, 107, 116 modern body, ix-x, 48–9, 51, 53, 71–2, 85, 104–5, 150, 186, 187, 190 movement, 121 nonbodies, 58–61 and outside world, 63–6, 76 pain, 178–9 pregnant, 195n19, 206–7n20, 207n28 productive, 142–3 racial, 192–3n18 representational conflicts, 143 in space, 64–5 type, 61–3 unruly, vii, 94, 99–101, 106, 107 virtual, 121 wounded, 200n23

Body politic, 14, 77–8, 79, 143, 144, 157–63, 174 Booth, Wayne C., 3, 149, 172, 175–6, 186–7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 204n27 Bridges, Thomas, 161 Brinker, Menachem, 198–9n8 Brooks, Peter, 88–90, 91, 93, 107, 108 Brown, Rita Mae, 6 Bunyan, John, 186 Burney, Fanny, 26, 47, 136–7 Burroughs, William, 50–1 Butler, Judith, 47, 92–4, 109 Calinescu, Matei, 205n32 Carnival, 98–9 Carter, Angela, 7, 192n17 “The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe), 210n36 The Castle (Kafka), 129–30, 137–8 Cervantes, Miguel de, 30, 72, 164 “Cinderella,” 26 Circulation in narrative, 14, 142–5, 150, 153, 157–8, 160–1, 188–90 and city, 64, 142–4 Cixous, Hélèn, 80, 81, 163, 192n17 Chambers, Ross, 82, 203n14 Character, 12, 53–83, 148 actant, 201n34 as collection of traits, 55–6, 69–70, 79, 154, 200n31 contrasting characters in embodiment, 164–5 cultural assumptions vs. aesthetic concerns, 68 and physiognomy, 8, 15, 154–7 roundness, 154–5 semantic contrasts, 55–6, 61, 66 theories as spatializing, 68–72 “web of relationships,” 54, 68–9, 79

index / 227 Chatman, Seymour, 3, 55, 69, 79, 82, 172, 201n37, 205n1 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 45 Chronotope, 94–9, 102 Cities of the Red Night (Burroughs), 50–1 Cohen, Margaret, 166–7 Cohn, Dorritt, 120 Cole, F.J., 38 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 20 Conception, human, 11, 17, 18, 28, 34–6, 53, 68 history of theories for, 36–41, 196n36 Conrad, Joseph, 64, 69–70 Consciousness in narrative, 13 Coover, Robert, 50 Corporeality, feminist theories of, 75–6 Coste, Didier, 3, 81, 141, 189 The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), 131 Crittenden, Charles, 194n10 Crowe, Michael, 17 Cultural theory and criticism, 118 body in, 1 cross-cultural categories in narratology, 10–11 treatment of authority, 149–50, 175 Culture body and family, 59 body within, 45, 57, 118, 187, 196n43, 209n15 events and “social centers,” 86–7 imagined community, 150 role of representation within, 2 Cyberpunk writing, 199n10 Cyberspace, 122 Cyborg body, 49, 50 Cyclicity in medieval narrative, 32 Dante, 42, 43, 45, 138, 187 Darwinian narrative, 40, 48–51

Davis, Rebecca Harding, 167–9, 170 de Certeau, Michel, 110–12, 193n22 Deep structure, 71 Definite description, 22 Delaney, Samuel, 46 de Lauretis, Teresa, 157 Derrida, Jacques, 203n17 Descartes, René, 75 Description in narrative, 207–8n35 Desire and narrative, 88–90 Dickens, Charles, 68–9 Great Expectations, 26, 124–5 Diengott, Nilli, 192n7, 210n30 Differential embodiment, 14, 66, 156–7, 163–74, 178, 183–4 Distention, 14, 85–6, 103–5, 106, 114 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 42, 43, 45, 138, 187 Dolezˇel, Lubomír, 43, 125, 197n45, 198n8 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 30, 72, 164 Doody, Margaret Anne, 208n4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 170–1 Douglas, Mary, 57, 118, 187 Douglass, Fredrick, vii, 67, 132 Dreams, movement in, 134–5 Dreiser, Theodore, 25 Dumas, Alexandre, 131 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 101, 197n56 Eco, Umberto, 115 Écriture féminine, 80 Education, 7, 100–1 Egg, in theories of conception, 17, 37 Elements of narrative, 3, 4, 5, 117 Eliot, George, 30, 186 Embodiment degree, 66–7 disembodied perspective, 67, 162, 184

228 / index Embodiment – continued disembodiment through lever, 179–80 see also differential embodiment Emboîtement, 38 Embryology, see conception, human Emerson, Caryl, 203n10, 203n15 Emma (Austen), 5 Enthusiasm, 35 Epigenesis, 37, 196n43 Erdrich, Louise, 29 Evelina (Burney), 26, 47, 136–7 Event, 86–7 Every Man Out of His Humor (Jonson), 62–3 “Fantaisie Printaniere” (Norris), 65 Faulkner, William, 186 Sound and the Fury, 105–8, 111, 176 Fear of Flying (Jong), 6–7 Feminism, see narratology: feminist Fetterley, Judith, 5, 209n11 Fetus development, 36 influences on, 34 see also body: pregnant; conception, human Feynman, Richard, 23 Fictional world, 11, 12, 18, 19, 41, 42, 114, 194n10 access, 44–5 incompleteness of fictional entities, 20, 194n8 Fictionality, 18 Fielding, Henry, 155, 161, 165–6, 186, 187 Film female body in, 157 setting, 205–6n1 Flatland (Abbott), 134 Flaubert, Gustave, 187 Flax, Jane, 204n23

Flesh, 201n47 Folktale, 42 Ford, Ford Madox, 177–8 Forster, E.M., 81 Fox, Michael J., 27 Foucault, Michel, 9, 13, 108–9, 118, 120, 173, 193n22, 204n22, 204n27 and historicism, 10 The Order of Things, 71 Frame, 123–4, 136, 206n11 Frank, Joseph, 126 Frankenstein (Shelley), 34–6 Freccero, Carla, 33 Free indirect discourse, 5, 8, 120 Freud, Sigmund, 88–90 Freytag’s pyramid, 70–1 Frow, John, 202n48 Frye, Northrop, 12, 90–1, 93, 107, 108 Funkenstein, Amos, 193n1 Galen, 196n35 Gallagher, Catherine, 14, 19, 142–4, 156, 160, 185, 210n32 Gargantua (Rabelais), 33, 34, 36, 42 Garrick, David, 155 Gender in narrative, 4, 63, 99–100, 169–70 Genealogy, 33, 195n15 Genetics, x, 28, 29, 49 Genette, Gérard, 172 Ghost, 59–60 Gibson, William, 122 Gilbert, Sandra, 119 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 176 Gilman, Sander, 192–3n18 Ginsberg, Elaine, 47 Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin), 47 Glover, Crispin, 27 Gödel, K, 22 The Golden Ass (Apuleius), 96–9, 102

index / 229 The Good Soldier (Ford), 177–8 Goodman, Nelson, 43–4, 45, 174, 205n32 Goshgarian, G.M., 100–1 Graveyard, 124–5 Great Expectations (Dickens), 26, 124–5 Greimas, A.J., 69–70, 201n32, 201n36 Grosz, Elizabeth, 75–6, 77, 80, 81, 120–1, 188, 201n47 Gubar, Susan, 119 Guillaume de Lorris, 140 Hamlet (Shakespeare), vii, 22, 59–60, 124–5 A Handful of Dust (Waugh), 133 Haraway, Donna, 49 Hardy, Thomas, 121 Hareven, Tamara, 104–5 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 144 Harvey, W.J., 54, 68–9, 71, 79, 80, 122, 200n32 Harvey, William, 37, 64 Hayles, Katherine, 199n10 He, She and It (Piercy), 58 Hemingway, Ernest, 186 “Hills like White Elephants”, 128–9, 132 Hermeneutics and desire, 109 social, 78, 79 textual or narrative, ix, 12, 14, 15, 45, 53–4, 76–7, 80–3, 85, 86, 145–8, 158, 188–90 “Hills like White Elephants” (Hemingway), 128–9, 132 History, 17, 86–7, 94, 185, see also new historicism Hitchcock, Alfred, 131 Hobbes, Thomas, 14, 78, 159–60, 161–2, 173–4 Hochman, Baruch, 69, 70

Hogarth, William, 155 Holmes, Sherlock, 19, 20, 25 Homer, 127–8, 152–3, 187 Horn, David, 78, 79 Horne, R.H., 68–9 How, questions of, 3, 6 Hyde, Alan, 2, 206–7n20 Illness, 61–2, 118, 199n17 Imagination influence on fetus, 34 in setting, 132–3 Implied author, 8, 149, 175, 189 Implied reader, 112–16, 149, 175, 176, 189 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 66–7 Iser, Wolfgang, 113–14, 205n29 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 67 Jailbird (Vonnegut), 194–5n15 James, Henry, 30, 64, 186 Jameson, Fredric, 69–70, 189, 204n26 Johnson, Barbara, 35 Johnson, James Weldon, 46–7 Johnson, Mark, 1, 135 Jong, Erica, 6 Jonson, Ben, 62–3 Joyce, James, 59, 64, 171–2, 173 Jung, Carl, 200n23 Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis, 46, 197n53 The Castle, 129–30, 137–8 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 77–8, 79, 158–9 Keller, Eve, 196n43 Kellogg, Robert, 3, 30, 72 Kenner, Hugh, 171–2 Kerby, Anthony Paul, 88 Kibbie, Ann Louise, 208n38 Kinetic space, 13–14, 117, 125, 144 defined by Langer, 146–7

230 / index King Richard, 21 Kittay, Jeffrey, 207–8n35 Kripke, Saul, 21–3, 28 Kristeva, Julia, 107 Kundera, Milan, 180–4 Lacan, Jacques, 202n48 “Mirror Stage”, 92–4 Lafayette, Madame de, 17, 18, 193–4n2 Lakoff, George, 1, 135 Lang, Amy Shrager, 167–9 Langer, Susanne, 14, 145–8 Lanser, Susan, 4, 7, 173, 192n7, 210n30 Laqueur, Thomas, 193n23, 196n43 The Lathe of Heaven (LeGuin), 23, 25 Lawrence, D.H., 64 Lefebvre, Henri, 173 LeGuin, Ursula, 23, 25 Leibniz, G.W., 17, 18, 24, 193n1, 196n38 Level in narrative, 189–90 Lever, 178–84 Lewis, C.S., 30 Life in the Iron Mills (Davis), 167–9, 170 Locke, John, 196n38 Lodge, David, 54, 56, 198n4 Lombroso, Cesare, 61, 78, 79 Lord Jim (Conrad), 69–70 “Lost in the Funhouse” (Barth), 115–16 Lynch, Deidre, 8, 9, 154–6, 160, 161–2, 163, 164–5, 166 The Magic Mountain (Mann), 62, 144, 158, 160 Malthus, Thomas, 142–4 Mann, Thomas, 62, 144, 158, 160 Marlowe, Christopher, 22

Martin, Emily, 118, 199n17 Martin, Wallace, 3 Mason and Dixon (Pynchon), 59 Maupertuis, P.L.M. de, 38 Mayhew, Henry, 142–4 McCaffery, Larry, 122 McHale, Brian, 199n12 McKeon, Michael, 151–2, 153, 155, 156 McTeague (Norris), 65 Meaning, personal, 85, 88 Medieval narrative, 31–3, 44–5, 98, 140–1, 149, 158, 180 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 75, 120–1, 124, 126, 188, 201n47 Metafiction, 114–16 “The Metamorphosis” (Kafka), 46, 197n53 Metaphor bodily, 1, 14 and narrative, 141–2 Mezei, Kathy, 5, 6, 7 Miller, D.A., 120 Miller, Henry, 200n22 Mimesis, 11, 31, 32, 34, 72, 114 “make-believe”, 41 Modern narrative, 45, 140–1, 163, 176 relation to print, 153–4 relation to sorted characters, 73 Monborne, B, 166 Monologic, see polyphony Monopoly (game), 127 Monster, 34, 119, 195n30, 199n17 Morrison, Toni Bluest Eye, 48 Beloved, 73–5, 76–7, 80, 81, 83, 145, 163 Morson, Gary Saul, 203n10, 203n15 Le Morte D’Arthur, 30 Mythic patterns in character identity, 29–30, 72 in plot, 90–1

index / 231 Name, 21, 29 chain of references, 22–3 and definite description, 22 The Name of the Rose (Eco), 115 Narratee, 4, 9, 149, 177, 189 Narration, 14, 192n17 masculine and feminine styles, 6 narratology’s treatment of, 149–50 omniscient, 120 unreliable, 176–7 see also authority: in narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), vii, 67, 132 Narratology and historicism, 9, 10, 185, 192n7 history of, 2–4 feminist, 4–7, 8, 12, 101, 172–3 normal science, 67–8, 71, 82, 187, 211n2 and race, 8, 192–3n18 relation to cultural criticism, 149–50 as scientific, 18, 173, 192n7, 210n30 story and discourse, 126, 189, 204n28 technical issues vs. content, 4–5 and temporality, 4 treatment of voice, 171–4 treatment of world, 43, 45 as typology, 4, 53, 192n7 Narrator, 175–8, 189, 205–6n1 dramatized, 176–8 Nation, 149–50, 158–60 Needham, Joseph, 196n36 Neuromancer (Gibson), 112 New criticism, 54 New historicism, 9–10, 119–20, 144 “moderately historical” concepts, 10–11, 185 Norris, Frank, 65, 83

Novel comic, 164–5, 173 history of, ix, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 60, 94–6, 99, 151–2, 154–5, 160–1, 163 modernist, 43, 82, 108, 186 sentimental, 165–70, 173, 175 Object bodies as, 72 bodies contrasted to other, 58–61 hypothetical entities, 19 and material, 162 in narrative, 5, 12, 200n32 text as object, 171–4 and visibility, 154, 207–8n35 Objectivity, 152 Odyssey (Homer), 127–8, 152–3, 187 O’Neill, John, 45 O’Neill, Patrick, 189 Organic form, 147 Originality in writing, 31 Orlando (Woolf ), 46 Oroonoko (Behn), 61 Orwell, George, 132–3, 186 Ovism, 38 Pamela (Richardson), 99–100, 165–6 Pantagruel (Rabelais), 33, 34, 36 Passing narratives, 47 The Passion of the New Eve (Carter), 7, 192n17 Pavel, Thomas G., 194n7 Penal system and narrative, 60, 120 Perception interior and exterior, 102–8 perceptual access in setting, 131–2 Performance of identity, 47 Perspective relation to world, 17, 122 for viewing whole society, 160–3

232 / index Phelan, James, 56, 74, 191–2n6, 198n8 Phenomenology in Bakhtin, 203n15 of reading, viii time consciousness, 103–5, 107 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 165, 175 Piercy, Marge, 58 Play, 42 Plot, 12–13, 85–116, 192n17, 201n37 brute physical events, 13, 91–2, 94 crisis, 96 delay, 88–90, 203n14 everyday time, 96 in history, 86–7 individual and general body in, 101–2, 112 narrative distention, 103–8, 114 personal life, 88 and response criticism, 112–16 and social practice, 108–12 transformation in, 96–7, 102 unruly body in, 99–101 Poe, Edgar Allan, 210n36 Polyphony, 171 Poovey, Mary, 173–4 Pope, Alexander, 166 Positioning in body politic, 14, 157–63, 174, 210n32 of reader, 8–9, 15, 113, 150, 155, 156–7, 168, 177, 209n11 Possible worlds, 17, 18–25, 41, 124, 185, 193n1, 194–5n15 accessibility, 126 constructing alternative worlds, 20–1 modal structure, 125–6 as modern, 32–6, 41 as open-ended, 24–5

Postmodernism, 59, 60, 114–16, 199n12, 204n23 Power, 109–12 Practice, as a critical concept, 108–12, 204n27 Preformationism, 37–9, 40 Prince, Gerald, 3, 192n6, 205–6n1, 211n2 La Princesse de Clèves (Lafayette), 17, 18, 193–4n2 Print culture, 150–7 Prompt, 41 Pynchon, Thomas, 59, 199n12 Rabelais, François, 33, 34, 36, 42, 98 Race, 8, 192–3n1 Ray, William, 193–4n2 Reader response criticism, 112–16 Reading agency, 180, 183–4, 205n29 as circulation, 145, 188 as disembodied, vii-viii, ix, 155 emotion in, 170 as isolated in print, 151 as private, viii relation between reader and text, 44–5, 74, 76–7, 80–3, 150, 158, 163, 188 relation to characters, 202n48 temporality of, 205n32 by women, 5 see also reader response criticism; positioning of reader Rear Window, 131 Rebirthing, 26, 47–8 Reference, 1–2, 11, 19, 21 fixing a reference, 22–3 Rhetoric, 3, 7, 8, 14, 81, 168 Richard III (Shakespeare), 61 Richardson, Samuel, 99–100, 165–6 Ricoeur, Paul, 13, 85–6 Time and Narrative, 103–5

index / 233 Riffaterre, Michael, 19 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 204n28 Robot, 58, 59 Roe, Shirley, 196n43 Rohy, Valerie, 47 Rolle, Samuel, 144 Roman de la Rose (Guillaume de Lorris), 140 Ronen, Ruth, 123–4, 128, 136, 194n8, 206n11 Rowling, J.K., 134 Rubyfruit Jungle (Brown), 6–7 Russell, Bertrand, 20 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 44, 125–6 Ryding, William, 32 Sawday, Jonathan, 39, 45, 131 Scarry, Elaine, 13, 121, 122, 124, 178–80 Scholes, Robert, 3, 30, 72 Schwenger, Peter, 59 Science Fiction, 35–6, 46, 136, 199n10 Scott, Walter, 21 Secrecy in narrative, 60 Segregationist definitions of fictional reference, 20, 194n7 Selzer, Mark, 8–9 Sennett, Richard, 64 Setting, 3, 13–14, 117–48 access by proxy, 130 conditions of access, 133–40 conventional vs. physical limits, 136–7 degree of access, 127–9 and frame, 123–4, 136, 206n11 means of access, 129–33 metaphysical constraints, 137–8 stereotyped, 136–7 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, vii, 22, 59–60, 124–5 Richard III, 61 Shaviro, Steven, 50–1

Shelley, Mary, 34–6 Sherman, Stuart, 204n19 Shuttleworth, Sally, 208n38 Sight, 76, 120, 131, 139 imaging technology, 135, 207n28 visibility in modern narrative, 153–4 Sir Launcelot Greaves (Smollett), 164, 165 Situation, 82 Slattery, Dennis Patrick, 200n23 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 134, 207n26 Smollett, Tobias, 155, 161, Sir Launcelot Greaves, 164, 165 Sontag, Susan, 62 Sophocles, 59 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), 105–8, 111, 176 Space abstract space, 173–4 body/house trope, 119 social, 118–20 see also setting; chronotope Spatial form, 117, 126 Speilberg, Steven, 27–9 Sperm, in theories of conception, 17, 37 Stanzel, Franz, 3, 172, 201n39 Statistics, 8, 78 Stepto, Robert, 193n18 Stewart, Garrett, 180 Stewart, James, 131 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 167–9 Suleiman, Susan, 6–7, 192n17 Suvin, Darko, 141–2 Swammerdam, Jan, 38 Swift, Jonathan, 35, 140, 186, 187 Symbol, natural, 57, 118 Taylor, Jane H.M., 32 Thompson, Lea, 27

234 / index Time exterior regulation, 104–5, 106, 107, 204n19 interior and exterior, 102–8, 110 narrative as transitive, 189 see also plot; chronotope To the Lighthouse (Woolf ), 64–5, 71, 138–40 Todd, Dennis, 35 Tompkins, Jane, 128, 205n29 Tool, 179 Touch, 76, 77, 120 as model for hermeneutics, 80–3, 188–9 Transcoding, 189 Trans-world identity, 21, 28, 41, 46–8, 197n56 Travel, 134, 136 Troilus and Criseyde, 30 Trollope, Anthony, 63 Tropic of Cancer (Miller), 200n22 Trouble on Triton (Delaney), 46 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera), 180–4 Uncle Charlie Principle, 171–2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 167–9 Vaihinger, Hans, 34 van Boheemen, Christine, 195n18 Vesalius, 39 Vico, Giambattista, 17, 18, 193n1

Virtual space, 14, 145–8 Vitz, Evelyn Birge, 31, 44, 72, 140–1 Voice in narrative, 4, 170–3 Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse-Five, 134, 207n26 Jailbird, 194–5n15 Virus, 50–1 Walton, Kendall, 41–2, 43, 44 Warhol, Robyn, 4–5, 6, 7, 170, 192n7 Warner, Susan, 128 Watt, Ian, 30, 156, 165–6 Waugh, Evelyn, 133 Weight, 178–84 Weimann, Robert, 208n5 What, questions of, 3, 6 White, Hayden, 10, 81, 86–7, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 99 The Wide, Wide World (Warner), 128 Wilde, Oscar, 165, 175 Wilson, Tom, 28 Wittig, Monique, 192n17 Woolf, Virginia Orlando, 46 To the Lighthouse, 64–5, 71, 138–40 World, see fictional world Yellin, Jean Fegan, 67 The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman), 176

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